# Executive Summary

This year’s annual report analyzes what sustainability is and what well-being is, and discusses about wisdom, rules and actions for coexisting with the Earth. We believe that this report provides an important answer to the question of how we can achieve sustainability of the Earth beyond the conflicts between individual countries. And in this report, we also show an important direction of what role Japan has to play in this time.

☐ In ancient times, the global environmental impact caused by human activities might not exceed the capacity of natural process called regeneration and selfpurification. We can assume that it was a “primitive sustainable society.” In this “primitive sustainable society,” human impact were enough small within the environmental capacity, with various forms of wisdom, including local knowledge, traditional rules and religious taboos even though these were unscientific.

As the time passed, humans have overcome the various problems for social and economic development through the progress in technology and systems. However, the technological and systematic changes were so tremendous that humans could not accumulate and utilize the wisdom for achieving environmental sustainability. For instance, the industrial revolution has introduced mass production and mass consumption due to mass wasting, leading to a new problem.

In a modern society, mainly in developed nations, there has been a remarkable increase of economic wealth and more people are materially satisfied, while economic inequality are growing and quite a few people struggle with poverty. From the global perspective, we can not achieve wisdom or moral standard for sustainability, therefore human activities are unsustainable.

Without preserving natural resources and energy, and without putting them stably into economic and social activities, the economy and society can not be stabilized, and human can not achieve social, economic and environmental sustainability. Therefore it is the task for all humans to use natural resources and energy efficiently, conserving the Earth's environment within the capacity of the Earth's regeneration and self-purification.

Under such circumstances, global concerns are about the issue that the limited resources and energy might not be able to support human life and economic activities because of rapid growth of world population.

As seen above, in ancient times, human impact to the Earth was within environmental capacity. However, from the view point of modern society, especially for the people of developed nations, the “primitive sustainable society” might be considered inconvenient and disadvantageous. We feel yearning for returning to such a sustainable society, but at the same time, we disappointingly know the difficulty to find the pass to follow, the strategies to launch, or the rules to adopt, because of the gap between the primitive society and modern society.

Feeling such stagnation, people seem to seek hints for changing the current situation by applying past times to modern times. They try to analyze human history through which human has struggled and overcome numerous difficulties. Recent best-selling books show the trend that people tend to read books about the human history of long time scale: thousands to tens of thousands years.

What should we do in order to get rid of unsustainable development and to achieve the sustainability?

Firstly, we should understand the capacity of the Earth. Secondary, we should accumulate the knowledge of the ecosystems. And then, we should integrate the human wisdoms.

We would face depletion of resources and energy at a speed and on a scale that we have not ever experienced, because the environmental impact caused by human activities is much larger than nature’s regeneration and self-purification.

The ecosystem services support our human lives. It is also important for wildlife to preserve wide range of habitats and connectivity of the ecosystems; wild animals migrate beyond national borders and regardless of administrative boundaries. The original functions of the ecosystems are given only if enough range of habitats and connectivity of the ecosystems are preserved. However, serious fragmentation of ecosystems caused by human activities has been reported in all around the world. It is necessary to establish regional and global cooperation and to set targets for achieving sustainability.

We need to integrate the wisdom of the world. For this purpose, various efforts are taken to develop better indicators for measuring sustainability or human well-being, adding orthodox indicators for measuring economic growth like GDP. Then we must establish rules and take actions as quickly as possible with scientific certainty. These efforts lead to improve indicators for measuring sustainability or happiness of people, with which we can evaluate human from various perspectives, despite using a single standard.

We need fair rules and effective actions which based on scientific knowledge as soon as possible. However, there are significant gaps between developed countries, which have already obtained the fruits of economic development, and developing countries, which