Building Resilient Regions

The process for realizing sustainability must be carefully considered. Equity, vulnerability and well-being are important factors. Concepts in sustainability and vulnerability are complementary and closely related; mitigating the vulnerability of the human-environment system can increase its resilience or sustainability. First, sustainable development necessarily requires the integration of social, economic and environmental goals. Integration begins with the recognition that the environment and society are closely linked. There are three layers of environment that are relevant, that is, the Geo-environment, the Eco-environment and the Socio-environment. Second, well-being consists of multiple factors and is defined as hierarchical in this study. Third, sustainability is considered from the perspective of the fundamental theory of welfare economics. Fourth, a social-environmental analysis in Bangladesh is shown regarding vulnerability. Finally, the results of the social-environmental analysis demonstrate that it is necessary to take the diverse character of the social environment in different areas into account.

Vulnerability has been discussed in various situations, including regional management policy. The global economic crisis has caused much confusion, with events such as the Lehman shock, the destructive influence of natural disasters, and so on; the concept of resilience is said to be effective in absorbing these shocks in a flexible manner. The aim of this chapter is to determine how to build resilience in individuals and organisations working on various tasks; examples of how to enhance resilience will be examined. The first two sections provide an overview of the transition of concepts as applicable to multiple fields, as resilience concepts are used in various fields. These concepts are based on the two aspects of continuity and recovery when facing environmental changes. The third section presents specific examples of resilience. The paper discusses reports of the recovery process from disasters; regions rich in social capital recovered from the crisis efficiently and effectively through collaborative work and activities. In other words, social capital is a recovery engine. The concept of Resilience Engineering is becoming more sophisticated through its application to fields requiring improved safety measures, including air traffic control and medical safety. The fourth section details the act of building resilience. The chapter concludes by summarizing that individuals and organisations need to build resilience, predict the extent of the impact on the environmental change in advance, and cope with actions to minimize the impact of the disaster. It is necessary to prepare a recovery plan to overcome such influences.

In Japan which is heading straight to an ageing society with a declining birth rate, population decline is a serious issue. Many rural districts are advancing efforts which are different from tourism for attracting urban dwellers to rural areas. The focus of this paper is the examples of rural revitalisation through “exchange with a particular purpose”.

The first case is support for rural districts by businesses. The important key for guaranteeing regional sustainability is in building a win-win business relationship, as rural communities and corporations work together to rediscover local resources and make full use of each other’s forte, rather than a one-sided relationship where rural communities provide opportunities for farming to corporations as a service.

The second case is support for rural districts by young people from the cities. The key feature of the case example is that young people from cities not only come to the area to secure a place for enjoying mountain activity but are engaged to no small extent in the sustainability of the rural region.

Challenges such as the increase in disused farmlands and desolation of the forests caused by the ageing population, declining birth rate and depopulation can transform to appealing resources for city dwellers (workers).

For people living in cities and corporations, activities which let them feel the soil and commune with nature hold new hidden values such as the refreshment of the body and mind, formation of intercommunity and the joy of creating a place for shared enjoyment.

Although Shimokiyamachi area is adjacent to the Kyoto downtown, it has maintained a peaceful atmosphere and environment with waterfowl on the Takasegawa River, which is an environmental and cultural resource. The residents that have led the area for many years are ageing, and regional participation by new residents has been insufficient. Therefore, volunteers formed an executive committee, recorded the memories of the important history that residents maintained about local environmental and cultural resources, and issued a small newspaper to share these memories. In addition, the committee developed riverbeds to increase enjoyment of the river environment and to promote interaction among new and old residents and visitors. This chapter presents the case of a small human network aimed at regional revitalization using a small newspaper to transmit regional memories and promote river resources for interaction while experiencing the river environment. Activities by volunteers’ human networks for regional tasks are difficult to sustain because funds and systems are unreliable. However, because of population decline and ageing, the residents cannot support the region alone, and participation from outside the region is indispensable. To transmit the environmental and cultural resources of the region, it is necessary to continue to revitalize the area using the human network that includes residents and visitors.

The aim of this study is to consider depopulation from the viewpoint of managing the environment. This study focuses on Kumogahata in Kyoto and regards the depopulation as an environmental problem. By approaching the issue from the viewpoint of environmental management, depopulation is regarded as one aspect of the diversity of the region. In the management of the environment, it is necessary to focus on the social background of environmental issues. Thus, the social background was understood by considering some activities and the purposes of the various associations in Kumogahata. As a result, it was found that there are various associations having a variety of purposes in the depopulated areas. Consequently, we propose to add the new step of “forming a residential type of exchange population” to the existing plan.

Housing land space is a high proportion of land use in urban areas. Therefore, vegetation of individual gardens contributes to greening of the metropolis and amenity. In this chapter, I surveyed resident’s conscious about greenery for private gardens in a detached houses area. Gardens may be lost through house renovations or ownership changes. Preservation of gardens leads to an increase in greenery in the urban area. I examined resident’s awareness of the inheritance of greenery in a private garden and searched for unfavorable conditions of gardens such as trimming trees. As a result, the transfer side and receiving side had different consciousness. Consciousness for inheritance of greenery is affected by the regional community and social awareness. It is important to initiate an interest in greenery and teach the greenery of a garden contributes to the urban environment. It is also necessary to consider how to maintain the greenery, for example, tree trimming and cleaning, in the community.

This chapter surveys the performance of social enterprises and examines how they solve various social problems. Social enterprises can be regarded as a new model of modern non-profit organisations (NPOs). They are working to challenge and untangle the various social obstacles we face today, such as issues relating to the environment and well-being, the inequality of educational opportunities, and the disparity in income distribution.

Although prompt action must be taken to overcome these challenges, governments alone cannot find an answer to them in a satisfactory manner, so social enterprises have recently stepped in and are shifting the boundaries. From the viewpoint of sustainability, to accomplish their various targets, they need to earn money by generating their own business. They also need to receive contributions or investments to continue their activities. Many start-up social enterprises are struggling to obtain resources such as manpower, contributions, and grants. The success stories of social enterprises impact various fields. Through tough experiences, some of them obtain business know-how. Afterwards, they can support other NPOs. This movement suggests that the community supports social enterprise, such as business incubators.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) reported 27 cases in the Social Business Casebook (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Social Business Casebook (Earthquake Disaster Recovery Version) – social business for reconstruction of disaster area). http://​www.​meti.​go.​jp/​press/​2011/​01/​20120113002/​20120113002.​html (2013/9/11) (in Japanese) 2012) regarding the recovery process after the Great East Japan Earthquake. We examine various cases and demonstrate how society-oriented corporations and business-oriented non-profits deal with numerous tasks, with a focus on short-term problems such as the basic services of daily life. The actors involved include seven non-profits and three for-profit organisations. A higher number of for-profit groups deal with medium-term or long-term challenges such as business risk.

In Japan, household waste management is the responsibility of municipalities, while industrial waste management is the responsibility of the waste-generating businesses. Because most companies do not have their own waste treatment facilities, it is common for them to contract with licensed companies that have waste treatment facilities. Contracting fees and highly recycling or environmentally friendly facilities are very costly. The problem is that waste disposal companies do not have any incentive to engage a good contractor.

With the progress of decentralisation in 2000, local governments were able to introduce their own local taxes. In 2002, an industrial waste tax was introduced in Mie Prefecture to fund the disposal of industrial waste. However, if a disposal company enters into an agreement with a contractor that has a good facility certified by the prefecture, the tax is not assessed. In Mie Prefecture, a comparison of the amount contracted to taxable facilities to that of tax exempt facilities before and after the introduction of tax showed those who owned tax exempt facilities tended to have a higher rate of increase. It is possible that the introduction of the tax contributed to better waste disposal. By 2016, 27 of 47 prefectures had introduced industrial waste taxes.

In Japan, the Soil Contamination Countermeasures Act was enacted in 2002. Since then, implementation of the required countermeasures to tackle land contamination in urban areas has improved considerably. However, the pollution of soil on private land may spread undetected. Moreover, contaminated land may be left untreated because ridding soil of contamination is very expensive. Therefore, further countermeasures to reduce the environmental risk of land contamination in urban areas are necessary. This study’s purpose is to suggest methods of environmental risk management for urban land contamination in Japan.

First, we consider sources of contamination, differentiating point sources and nonpoint sources, to evaluate how best to manage the environmental risk of land contamination. The characteristics of these two source types are explained through the concept of transaction costs.

Second, we discuss how Japan has approached land contamination problems and adopted regulations since the period of high economic growth. We also briefly discuss foreign countries’ regulations. We then examine what kinds of typical environmental policy measures are effective in environmental risk management for land contamination.

Finally, we suggest practical methods of environmental risk management for land contamination in urban areas. This requires efficient methods to reduce contamination with low transaction costs. In particular, the costs of monitoring and enforcing to reduce contamination caused by nonpoint sources are high. Therefore, it is important to manage these sources appropriately.

The inheritance of disaster memory is considered an important issue. Disaster prevention is one of the main functions of urban parks, and every time a catastrophe occurs, disaster prevention functions have been improved. For disaster prevention, in addition to ‘public assistance’ such as maintenance of facilities and systems (hardware) by the administration, ‘self-help’ and ‘co-aid’ by each citizen are indispensable. Besides the infrastructure or hardware aspect, urban parks become places to convey memories of disasters and potential contributors to ‘software’ such as raising the consciousness level of disaster prevention and improving the ability to prevent local disasters. In this research, I focus on the inheritance of local memories in order to enhance the disaster prevention function of urban parks. After reviewing past researches, I examined the evidence of memories of disasters in parks in Naka Ward, Yokohama City. As a result of my study, I discovered that there are some monuments mentioning earthquake disasters in the inscriptions, although communicating memories of disasters is not the main purpose of the monuments. There are some monuments that are memorials to war damage and accidents. I consider parks’ function of inheriting memories of disasters as still insufficient. It is necessary to clarify the purpose of inheritance, the subject of inheritance, and the measures taken to nurture inheritance of disaster memories in order to make better use of parks to improve the ability of the area to prevent disasters.

Although typically considered private goods, some private hedges are supported by the public sector through subsidies or regulations because they serve a public function such as contributing to the environment, landscape, and disaster prevention. When a big earthquake occurs, death or injury often is a result of collapsing structures such as concrete brick fences. A pressing problem is converting unsafe structures into safe structures as soon as possible. This chapter examines the current state of public supply to privately owned hedges as private goods. Various measures of direct supply are considered such as regulation, induction and attraction, and enlightenment concerning hedges in Japan. The main means of promoting the public supply of hedges is induction, particularly the subsidy system. Enlightenment measures are performed in specific ways. However, direct supply and direct regulation are not typical. Considering public support of hedges, the systems should be enriched to aggressively advance hedge-ization.

In this study the authors aim to clarify the role of environmental valuation in public policymaking through a case study of valuing the waterside along a river in an urban area. First, it is indicated that the role of urban waterside has dual aspects: one role is to mitigate damages from various disasters such as earthquakes and fires, and the other role is to provide a comfortable environment for residents along the river. Then, in order to identify residents’ demands concerning the waterside in particular from the viewpoint of their daily life, a discrete choice model is set up. The model is then applied to a case study. Not only revealed preference data but also stated preference data are used in the case study. Finally, the limited role of the value of the waterside environment that is obtained from the model is shown.

Japan has experienced a number of large-scale natural disasters, and social demand for effective infrastructure to manage risks related to these disasters is increasing under the constraint of public financial drought. In practice, benefits under risk only account for the expected value of the physical and human damages, and therefore, the integration of the idea of ‘risk premium’ and ‘vulnerability’ into cost-benefit analysis needs to be addressed.

This chapter utilizes data from a questionnaire concerning municipal water cut-off risk as a case study to investigate the decision-making process for the valuation of risk premium. We focus on two decision-making frameworks: decision-making under risk and the prospect theory. We examine whether risk prevention behaviour or risk-cost trade-off choices concerning water cut-off risk are affected by the risk aversion index, risk perception, and the reference point effect or not by using a logit regression and an interval regression analysis.

The main conclusion is as follows: risk preference in terms of monetary scale does not affect the choice of a household in the case of water cut-off risk, whereas risk perception does. The reference point effect in the combination of loss aversion and probability evaluation is observed in the household’s choice experiment.

The aim of this study is to try to get an integrated understanding of the municipality’s disaster response in Nishihara Village, Kumamoto Prefecture, and of the victims’ perception of life recovery and assessment concerning health as well as to clarify the actual conditions and issues in the first year following the disaster, from the initial/emergency period of evacuation life to the early stages of recovery. The results of this survey make clear that the rapid response taken toward disaster victims in Nishihara Village was due to the flexible rearrangement of disaster response organizations and the way in which headquarters was established from the early stages of the disaster, as well as the creation of an original support system for rebuilding victims’ lives. It was also revealed that of the victims’ evaluations, assessment of perception of recovery was influenced by the damage situation and the housing situation. Furthermore, in health assessments, it was determined that deterioration of health among long-term shelter evacuees and in-vehicle evacuees has occurred.

As a measure against global warming, smart cities are being built to reduce the use of carbon by introducing renewable energy, securing dispersed and autonomous power supply, and managing energy at the scale of the city. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March in 2011, the concept of a smart city has gained considerable interest in Japan as a measure for controlling energy to improve disaster prevention ability and resilience to disasters. For shaping a smart city, energy-saving equipment and energy management systems should be introduced by using energy control technology, etc. Managing and controlling energy by means of a storage battery makes it possible to employ renewable energy sources such as solar power and to utilize energy potential. Furthermore, optimization and stabilization of energy supply and demand too can be contributed.

In this chapter, features of public–private partnership projects related to a smart city in the operational stage are described, which has been being developed for the reconstruction of afflicted areas. First, I will describe the concept and definition of smart city in Japan are explained, and then four cases of smart cities from Miyagi Prefecture are introduced. These four cases are “Alai Green City Project” as post-disaster public housing; “Tago West Project” as post-disaster public housing–general housing, mixed type; “Higashimatsushima Eco-Town Project” as post-disaster public housing–business complex type; and “Akaiwa Port Eco-Marine Processing Estate Project” as factory type.

In the planning stage of these projects, in addition to HEMS or BEMS for housings, also the networking of multiple facilities and introduction of large-scale energy infrastructure such as storage batteries and renewable energy are being studied. However, in Japan, presently, only limited part of the plan has been operationalized in power supply and its flexible distribution. In the next stage of operation, further improvement of the infrastructure, stability of profit structure, and reinforcement of the organization management to sustain electric power supply will be essential.