happiness indicator from three elements: socioeconomic conditions, including employment, income, education, and housing; mental and physical health; and relationships that include human bonding.

The Better Life Index defined in the OECD's How's Life? compares quality of life in 34 OECD member states. Countries ranked high in the comparison include Australia, Canada, and Sweden, while Chile, Mexico, and Turkey ranked low. Japan was ranked somewhere in the middle.

The OECD indicators for quality of life include some deficiencies in terms of environmental evaluation, since they depend excessively on the GGI for evaluation from an environmental perspective. For instance, air pollution status is the only indicator selected that is related to the environment. Another deficiency is the inclusion of some subjective evaluation items for selecting indicator groups, resulting in variations in calculation results according to the indicators selected. To verify these variations, the Ministry

## 5 Summary

As represented by the Rio+20 discussions on the Green Economy, to step up environmental, economic, and social sustainability in an integrated manner has emerged as a global issue. What do we need in order to be able to achieve an affluent and sustainable society?

First of all, natural resources essential to our livelihood are unevenly distributed around the world. Like fossil fuels and mineral resources, some of the natural resources that occur in the earth's crust are limited in terms of quantity. Even renewable resources such as forests and fisheries can be depleted if we overuse beyond nature's capacity to renew them. We must also consider the fact that if our generation exhausts the earth's natural resources, our children and grandchildren will have limited access to the resources they need.

Without considering the uneven distribution of natural resources, exhaustibility, and equity among generations, it is impossible to achieve a sustainable society. We must find the best way to use natural resources beyond resource limitations, in order to build a society and economy with the productivity for obtaining natural resources sustainably and to eliminate inequalities among generations.

Next, we discussed the impacts of human activity on the global environment. When we use natural resources in the course of our socioeconomic activities, various substances of the Environment carried out another study in the field of environmental economic policy, using two patterns of indicators: (1) the 21 OECD indicators; and (2) a total of 29 indicators consisting of eight additional environment-related indicators and the 21 OECD indicators. The results varied widely in terms of rank order between the two calculations (Table 1-3-3).

An international effort for establishing a method to evaluate quality of life has just been launched. However, the approach to explore true wealth—not only from an economic standpoint but also from environmental and social perspectives—will be the world trend for years to come, despite major deficiencies. The situation of humanity in the environment, society, and the economy should be examined objectively from broader points of view, such as natural resources, environmental impacts, quality of life, and social conditions.

that impact the environment are emitted. Also, some human activities such as land use and uncontrolled deforestation directly impact biodiversity. Since the severity of the impact on the global environment varies according to the level of human activity and the substances emitted, it is essential to minimize environment impacts and mitigate impacts in a way that is appropriate in each situation.

To achieve economic growth while overcoming bottlenecks in natural resources and environmental impact, we need technological innovation in the environmental sector as well as fiscal and policy support. Measuring business conditions in the environmental industry and providing related information are critical factors.

We should achieve environmental, economic, and social sustainability in order to improve quality of life and to pursue a society that allows us to feel happiness in our daily lives, while engaging in the socioeconomic activities essential to our survival. Here in Japan, there is a great push to achieve a sustainable society with a better life without fear, especially after having experienced the earthquake and tsunami disaster. In chapter 2, countermeasures against TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi NPS accident including the disposal of disaster waste caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake are discussed precisely.