Global COE program
"Center for Education and Research of Symbiotic, Safe and Secure System Design"
Keio University
Ecomaterials Forum
Coming into 2010's, the world has been greatly changed more than in the past and social sustainability has been threatened. The population of the world exceeded 7,000 million and is still increasing because of the growth of developing countries. Huge natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes struck, and we renewed our awareness of various risks of nuclear power. Looking at the world economy, many people are worrying about spreading financial crisis from Europe.
In such a situation, we recognize that sustainability should be redefined. In other words, we must develop conventional sustainability to attain a new idea considering social and economic aspects as well as the environment. For instance, we might incorporate into various social risks not only chemical materials, and have in-depth insight of relationship between economy and the environment. We are sure that a challenge of sustainability is to set up appropriate “sustainability indices” and to manage the society for optimizing the indices.
The International Conference on EcoBalance has been held once in every two years since 1994. At first, the conference was organized mainly for life cycle assessment (LCA), the discussion has extended to various environmental management indices and their applications in recent years. In the coming tenth conference, we would like to discuss sustainability indices as key indicators for sustainable society based on immense knowledge concerning environmental management indices which we made up in the past conferences. Moreover, we also discuss the application of these indices various locations and sectors, especially in Asian countries and regions as a leading growth center in the world.
We are confident that many people will join us and communicate with each other, and take a significant step toward challenge for sustainable society with you.
Chair of EcoBalance2012
Toshiharu IKAGA