Japan has often been cited as an example of a nation which is achieving the
objectives of'sustainable development' as advocated by the Brundtland Commission.
Various commentators believe that Japan attained rapid economic growth (at least until the
current economic crisis which began in the early 1990s) while simultaneously protecting its
environment, particularly after the oil crisis in 1973. However, this perspective ignores the
fact that Japan's economic 'miracle' still involves the consumption of large quantities of
low-entropy natural resources, and makes heavy use of the ecosphere's assimilative
capacity for high-entropy wastes.
Monetary analyses are excessively abstracted from biophysical reality and are
therefore incapable of providing ecologically meaningful indices of sustainable
development. Various biophysical approaches to assessment of sustainability have been
proposed to fill the gap. In this dissertation, I use one of these, 'ecological footprint
analysis,' to reassess the Japanese success story. The ecological footprint (EF) of a
specified population has been defined as "the aggregate area of land and water ecosystems
required continuously to produce the resource inputs and to assimilate the resource
outputs of that population wherever on earth the land/water may be located." It provides
a useful sustainability indicator in the form of the difference between a given country's
ecological footprint and its domestic area of ecologically productive land/water. The gap
between the two represents that country's 'ecological deficit' or 'sustainability gap.'
Data from 1880 indicate that the per capita Japanese EF in the pre-industrial era was
about 0.4 hectares (ha). By 1991 it had risen to 4.7 ha per person. Far from 'decoupling
from nature,' the historic trend has seen a ten-fold increase in Japan's per capita load on
the ecosphere. Japan is running a massive ecological deficit with the rest of the world.
Moreover, since there are only about 1.5 ha of ecologically productive land and 0.5 ha of
ecologically productive ocean per capita on Earth, Japanese material standards cannot be
extended to the entire world population without depleting natural resource stocks. I
conclude that the current level and form of Japanese resource consumption would be
unsustainable if every country tried to do the same. Global society needs to consider
alternative development paths that will reduce resource consumption by the inhabitants of
high-income countries while enhancing their quality of life. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/10130 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Wada, Yoshihiko |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 10663202 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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