Sato, M;
Usubiaga-Liaño, A;
Fairbrass, A;
Ekins, P;
Asuka, J;
(2024)
Monitoring environmental sustainability in Japan: an ESGAP assessment.
Sustainability Science
10.1007/s11625-023-01441-x.
(In press).
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Abstract
This paper assesses the environmental sustainability of Japan by applying the environmental sustainability gap (ESGAP) framework, which builds on the concepts of strong sustainability, critical natural capital, environmental functions, and science-based reference values. The assessment is carried out using two indices of environmental sustainability (Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (SESI) and Strong Environmental Sustainability Progress Index (SESPI)) that provide a snapshot and a trend perspective on environmental sustainability performance and on progress toward it. The results reveal that Japan has not experienced significant changes in terms of aggregate environmental sustainability throughout the 2011–2017 period, but this is primarily a consequence of the mutually offsetting movements of different indicators. The country performs best for the human health and other welfare indicators, but worst for the sink function indicators such as the per-capita CO2 emissions and the eutrophication of fresh water. The indices also expose the main policy areas that Japan needs to strengthen to improve its environmental performance. They include issues such as tropospheric ozone pollution, which has long been discussed in scientific literature but never been a primal policy focus of the government until very recently.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Monitoring environmental sustainability in Japan: an ESGAP assessment |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11625-023-01441-x |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01441-x |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186013 |
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