Page 14

014 FOREWORDFOREWORDLast year, the leaders of the group of seven industrialized countries (G7) declared the following in the “Leaders’ Declaration, G7 Summit, 7-8 June 2015, Germany”:‘‘As a common vision for a global goal of greenhouse gas emissions reductions, we support sharing with all parties to the UNFCCC the upper end of the latest IPCC recommendation of 40 to 70 per cent reductions by 2050 compared to 2010, recognizing that this challenge can only be met by a global response”.In the Paris Agreement adopted at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change last December, it was agreed to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century (Article 4). Therefore, the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has reached a new stage at which almost all of the countries in the world share responsibilities under the agreed framework.The Government of Japan decided to set Japan’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) of greenhouse gas emissions reduction for the UNFCCC conference in Paris last December at the level of 26.0 per cent by the fiscal year (FY) 2030 compared to FY 2013, which is approximately 1.042 billion t-CO2₂eq. The Government had also expressed its will to contribute proactively to the long-term goal of achieving at least a 50 per cent reduction in global GHG emissions by 2050, and as part of it to contribute to GHG reductions by developed countries in aggregate by 80 per cent or more by 2050.As part of the long-term GHG emissions reduction process, in October 2015 the Ministry of the Environment of Japan set up a round-table meeting (RM) to discuss a long-term strategy on climate change under the leadership of the Minister of the Environment. The RM convened five times from October 2015 to February 2016 – when it put together its Recommendations. Since I was the Chair of the RM, I am delighted to introduce below the major points of the Recommendations. Our RM discussions began with a reflection on Japan’s past performance in relation to GHG emissions reductions and the growth of the national economy. We looked at the co-relation between the GDP growth rate and the GHG emissions reduction rate. While there are many European countries such as Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Sweden and the UK, where both rates have grown positively, in Japan they have been stagnating around zero or falling into negative in the last 12 years. We made the same observation even when we looked at Japan’s statistics up to the year 2010, which was before 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred and Japan suspended operations at all of its nuclear power plants. Many OECD countries have managed to achieve successfully both an economic growth and GHG emissions reductions, but we could not. As a result, the amount of GHG emissions per unit of GDP went down dramatically in Japan – from the ranking of the third in the world in 1990 and 2000, to the twelfth in 2012 (according to the UNFCC Country Inventory Data and IMF-World Economic Outlook Database). Therefore, the common consideration shared with all the members of the RM was how to achieve a good economic performance and and reduce GHG emissions at the same time, as far as the targets of 2030 and even 2050 were concerned.Moreover, the technological aspect of GHG emissions reduction was also considered to be of significant Pictured: Professor Takashi Onishi PROFESSOR TAKASHI ONISHI, PRESIDENT, SCIENCE COUNCIL OF JAPAN (SCJ)PRESIDENT, TOYOHASHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (TUT)