JAPAN SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE

It is approximately 4.6 billion years since the formation of the Earth, two hundred thousand years since the birth of our ancestors, more than twenty years since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro (The Earth Summit), and seven years since the Kyoto Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP3) which was the first to adopt the reduction of greenhouse gases. When considering the span of the Earth's history, it is a mere blink of an eye since humankind has become aware that the planet's resources and energy are finite and that their increasing consumption will affect the global climate. Although, to this end, we have begun to take various countermeasures, economic activities in pursuit of an affluent lifestyle are simply expanding. This is because nobody can actually fully comprehend the limit of the Earth's resources.

Primary location: Sapporo Japan