Figure 2-2-1-4 Challenges of and obstacles to ICT Town Development

(Source) MIC "Survey Research on Current State of Local ICT Utilization" (2013)

cooperate with disaster-resistant wireless networks, cloud computing services, common IDs and the like to allow a wide variety of data, such as sensor-provided real-time data and those held by the administrative sector including local governments, to support autonomous town development in ordinary times and disaster prevention and reduction efforts upon disasters.

In order to allow these systems to be installed in society, we should enable cooperation between towns in Japan and other countries, extract and solve challenges for using Big Data and other new ICT technologies and visualize these solutions to promote cooperation between relevant parties and eliminate concern about personal data handling.

To this end, the MIC is verifying the effectiveness of ICT Smart Towns in a real environment under the FY2012 ICT Town Development Promotion Project.

### 2. Promoting measures for life resources using ICT

## (1) Social situation surrounding life resources

### a. Natural resources shortage and depletion under world population

## explosion and economic growth in emerging and developing countries

World population has increased year by year and has reportedly topped 7 billion. As population increases further with emerging and developing countries achieving rapid economic growth, demand is expected to expand rapidly for energy, minerals, water, food and other resources indispensable for human life.

Japan is also plagued with challenges regarding life resources.

First, Japan has heavy dependence on energy imports. It depends on imports for 96% of its energy supply excluding nuclear energy. This percentage is remarkably high among countries in the world.

Japan’s non-revenue water rate is relatively low at present. As Japan faces the serious problem of water pipes’ accelerated aging, however, the rate is expected to rise due to water leakage from aging pipes. Anticipating future developments, Japan must take water leakage prevention and other measures to address the aging of water pipes.

As for food resources, Japan’s food self-sufficiency ratio on a calorie supply basis declined from about 78% to about 40% in 48 years between 1961 and 2009 due to substantial eating habit changes including a decline in consumption of rice in which Japan is self-sufficient and an increase in livestock product and fat consumption. Under the situation, Japan is required to expand domestic agricultural production and appropriately combine domestic output with imports to secure stable food supply.

### b. Rapid aging of social infrastructure

Japan’s social infrastructure was intensively developed in its high economic growth period and is expected to age en masse in the future. Japan’s social infrastructure monitoring, maintenance and replacement are required to further improve their accuracy, efficiency and cost-effectiveness to protect the security in people’s lives.

## (2) Life resources problems and ICT

ICT is expected to contribute to realizing a highly efficient, safe, secure and sustainable society by facilitating the real-time acquisition, sharing, transmission, accumulation, analysis and control of information beyond time and distance constraints in phases for the production, distribution, consumption, maintenance and management of life resources. ICT's role is expected to grow more important in detecting, predicting and preventing anomalies in the aging social infrastructure and making optimum operation plans.

In the ICT area, sensors, Big Data, M2M (machine to machine), cloud computing and other technologies have made progress and diffused further recently. These new ICT technologies are expected to be utilized for life resources measures.

## (3) MIC initiatives

Given the abovementioned situation, the MIC initiated a council on ICT for life resources in December 2012 to consider how ICT could contribute to the stable, efficient securement of life resources as a global challenge and a challenge linked directly to the people’s safety and security. The council met eight times before compiling a report in May 2013.