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Apr 1, 2014 - Mar 31, 2015

Designing a Global Environmental Sustainability Index: A Preparatory Study for Interdisciplinary Resaerch for the Future Earth

Leader

   Since the industrial revolution, raising productivity has become a focus of societal goal, while per capita GDP became an influential indicator of the wealth of the citizens in the postwar period. After the end of the Cold War, concepts such as “sustainability” and “human development” gained currency, and various organizations have been developing indices to take the place of GDP. As yet, however, no index has been developed that places human activities in a larger context of global sustainability, in which appropriate regards are also given to both forces of global atmospheric-hydrological circulation and capacities of the world’s diverse life forms.

   Sugihara, Sato and Mine engaged in the development of such an index, called the Humanosphere Potentiality Index (HPI), in Kyoto University Global COE Program (2007-2012). Under the analytical framework of “humanosphere”, which is composed by “geosphere”, “biosphere” and “human society”, we considered that the genesis and development of each sphere has been following its inherent logic: “circulation” for geosphere, “diversity” for biosphere and “autonomy and empathy” for human society, respectively. We then selected nine indicators (solar energy, the atmospheric-hydrological circulation index, and CO2 emissions for geosphere, biomass, biodiversity and excess of the consumption of primary products (Human Appropriated Net Primary Production) for biosphere, and population, the care index and unexpected deaths for human society. According to the HPI thus calculated, tropical countries generally get a high evaluation, while the temperate-zone countries received poorer results. If we compare UNDP’s Human Development Index and HPI, a significant positive correlation has been found in tropical countries, while such a correlation disappears in temperate-zone countries. These findings imply that tropical countries may be better equipped to sustain the humanosphere and human development simultaneously. One remaining problem is that the HPI tries to measure the potentiality of humanosphere in the long run rather than the human-nature interaction in the short-term, which, some scholars commented, makes it hard to understand what sort of perspective the index is backed by and stands for.

   Coinciding with the formal launch of Future Earth, a new international research initiative, in 2015, and on the strength of our experience of the previous project, this study aims to develop a fully robust index for the assessment of global environment sustainability. In particular, we take on two specific tasks, a reexamination and updating of the HPI by incorporating the latest knowledge relating to global warming or biodiversity into both our methodology and the data, and a fuller demonstration of the practical utility of the HPI through the analysis of a specific country (India). We believe that the international circulation of the improved index will challenge the prevailing paradigm, which remains focused on the rise of productivity, and help identify a sustainability-driven development path.