Sociotechnical Routes Needed to Save Society from Energy and Environment Crises

We, in the developed countries, are now facing the heavy burden of reducing green house gases’ emission 70 to 90% by 2050. This requires us a significant change in thinking on the future of the modern society. The five year R&D program ‘Community-Based Actions against Global Warming and Environmental Degradation’ of JST-RISTEX started from 2008 aims at initiating new actions to reform the present sociotechnical systems existing on the basis of fossil fuels. Since the reform necessary to cope with the global environment issues is limited to a fixed period of some 40 years, which is already too soon due to the social inertia, the present R&D program has been designed to aim at not incremental and merely technical actions but sociotechnical innovations. The program tackles the issues of: 1) Less horizontal collaboration among sections and divisions both in government and academia, 2) Less equal partnership among local people, government, industry and academia, 3) Maniac technical challenges even in cases where social actions or appropriate technologies are effective or necessary, 4) Qualitative, ethical and enlightening approaches rather than practical and profitable ones, and 5) Sector-by-sector and region-by-region target settings rather than collaborative ones. To develop new ways of solving the above issues by bringing ordinary people into the reform actions, this program has set its objective of working from a very fundamental viewpoint of “reconstructing modernity” into fossil-fuel-free one. Since rural areas much left from petroleum-based urbanization have high potential of evolving into bases for renewable-energy based social reform once population transfer from urban areas to country sides is realistically conducted together with agriculture, forestry and other industrial revitalization, the population transfer with endogenous decision making processes is one of the major issues of the present program. Among the relevant issues, cognitive process has a significant role in activating local societies. Through recognizing their redefined historical positions in the time of global warming, local communities can change to survive. In the present R&D program investigation on procedures for creating local sovereignty is highly stressed.