Asian Journal of Environment and Disaster Management 2010 2 2

doi: 10.3850/S1793924009000170

Environmental Changes and Japan’s Forest Management

Kumiko Fujita^a and Rajib Shaw^b Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University Kyoto, Japan. ^akumiko.fujita@gmail.com ^bshaw@global.mbox.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp

ABSTRACT

In these days, the forest and its surrounding environments are changing rapidly, and many people in various academic and practical fields discuss the changes-induced forest issues and the future forest management. Forestry has been defined as “the scientific management of forests for the continuous production of goods and services”.¹ For example, for decades following the Second World War, timber supply dominated international forestry issues.² Over the past 20 years the scope of biologic and environmental sciences contributing to forest management has expanded beyond eco-physiology, genetics, and vegetationmanagement to encompass soil processes, ecosystem structure and dynamics, hydrology, wildlife biology, fisheries, restoration ecology, conservation biology, and landscape ecology.¹ Though the forest management issues are the global challenges now, the expectation and image toward forests are different in each country and region. Therefore each country needs to analyze typical issues in each country for supporting to solve world issues. Forestry of Japan has been developed for a long time. Since the Japanese expectations toward forest before and after the globalization in 1990s are distinctly different, domestic forest issues need to be discussed based on the trend of world forestry.

Keywords: Forest, Disaster, Climate change, People’s livelihood.

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