The Inoue Group of CRDS/JST surveys and designs R&D strategies in the field of environmental and energy science/technology by extracting key issues and research areas through workshops and brainstorming sessions, and surveying international trends from a bird's eye view. To work out a concrete R&D strategy once the key research area has been defined, we identify the most important R&D issues and implementation strategies for application to the relevant research area.
This report is on a U.S./Japan comparative study carried out from February to April 2005 on one of the key research areas: 'A study on the conservation and intensive use of biodiversity?ecosystem functions', which focused on terrestrial biodiversity-ecosystem research.
The goal of this study is to gather information mainly on the U.S. after visiting a number of leading organizations, to analyze this critically and make a comparison with R&D implementation systems (planning/implementation strategies, research framework, research facilities, etc) in order to disseminate the results in Japan for designing biodiversity?ecosystem R&D strategies. Furthermore, for the positive advancement of the studies, we established a committee consisting of a number of domestic experts (The G-TeC Panel), and with that as our focus, made on-site investigations and reports.