About this program

PUBLIC NEEDS for this R&D Area

Social problems to be solved:

• Global warming and environmental degradation
• Decline of local community, especially in rural areas
• Immoderate modernization based on fertile fossil energy supply
• Incompetence of sciences, technologies and social systems for overcoming problems above due to disintegration
• Global warming and environmental degradation

To construct socially effective solutions for global warming and environmental degradation, it is essential to introduce a structuralized approach　based on socio-technological analysis.

GOALS:

Social problems to be solved:

• To create a social wave that will modify immoderate modern social metabolic systems through consistent collaboration among initiatives for pollution control, waste management, energy conservation and renewable energy intensification, bio-diversity conservation and traditional culture and local community revitalization.
• To develop regional field-based collaboration of people within scientific disciplines, government agencies, various industries and academia with sufficient emphasis on further applications of the methodologies thus developed for other both in Japan and abroad.

R&D Program:

Community-Based Actions against Global Warming and Environmental Degradation (FY2008–2013)

To fund and support R&D projects (of 3-5yrs. in duration) that are designed to pursue Goal1and/or Goal2

• Decline of local community, especially in rural areas.
  • Category I:
    Projects that conduct surveys and research necessary to solve the above-mentioned problems and that provide options as well as policy recommendations.
  • Category II:
    Projects that aim to develop and demonstrate technologies (systems) and techniques necessary to solve problems (at least one PDCA cycle in the period)