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The environmental field is deep and wide. In the tsunami of information, how can people dig deeper to understand underlying causes of what they hear about the environment from newspapers and TV? Environmental Systems Studies: A Macroscope for Understanding and Operating Spaceship Earth was originally published in Japanese, aiming at providing basic information about the thoughts and methods to see and understand the interconnection between nature and human activities from a systematic viewpoint.
Then the author prepared an English version of the same material to use it as a textbook for the Global Environmental Leaders Program at Nagoya University where the author taught many students coming from Asia and Europe. Environmental Systems Studies: A Macroscope for Understanding and Operating Spaceship Earth covers diverse environmental issues such as climatic change, biodiversity conservation, energy saving and resource recycling, while readers can learn common analytical and thinking methods to identify the core essence of economic and ecological interdependence, look at problems from overarching perspective and consider countermeasures to be taken.
1. Introduction: Seeing and Understanding Interactions between Nature and Humanity
2. Operating Spaceship Earth
3. Understanding the Global Climate System
4. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service:Indicators of the Global Environment 61
5. An Evolutionary View of the Environment
6. Transforming Our Society: Towards Low Carbon, Coexistence with Nature, and Sound Material Cycles
7. The Environment as a Commons:How Should It Be Managed?
8. Economics of the Environment
9. Resources, Energy, and Environmental Load
10. An Asian Perspective
Epilogue
Emeritus Professor at Nagoya University After he received his doctoral degree (1974) in Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo, he joined the Japan Environment Agency, and subsequently worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Yokohama Municipal Government. After 14 years of being engaged in environmental policymaking in national, international, and local institutions, Dr. Imura moved to Kyushu University in 1988, where he was a professor at the Institute of Environmental Systems until August 2000. Since September 2000 until 2011, he had been a professor at Nagoya University, and he moved to Yokohama National University in 2011.
Dr. Imura has a wide range of expertise covering domestic and international environmental policy issues, environmental technologies, economics, and information in Japan, China and East Asian countries. His research focuses on energy and material flow analysis of human activities in cities, life cycle assessment of civil infrastructures, and modeling of human and environmental interactions. He served as a lead author of Working Group III of the Third Assessment Report of IPCC.
