Connecting Sustainable Development to Disaster Resilience in Japan

Disastrous scenery in Japan, Marumori after the Typhoon Hagibis. Water has reached to 2nd floor, cars have been washed away. This disaster has cruelly taken at least 73 people’s lives. Credit: Shutterstock

Japan is situated in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, making it susceptible to higher risks of natural disasters. As a result, natural disaster prevention is a top priority area across all policy spectrums in the country. On September 29 of last year, the GFCC hosted an online webinar called Innovating Out of Crisis: Learning to Navigate Crisis, which featured Professor Haruo Hayashi, President of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED), discussing the impacts of natural disasters on Japan’s preparedness and resilience building capabilities. This webinar was part of the Driving Innovation in Times of Crisis initiative which aims to understand crises and develop actionable recommendations to unlock new opportunities for innovation and enhance competitiveness. In this interview, Professor Hayashi talks about the connections between disaster resilience and sustainable development, strategies for managing an all-hazard approach to disaster, and the implications of population decline and an aging society on the economy.

GFCC: In what ways are disaster resilience and sustainable development connected?

Prof. Hayashi: Disaster resilience is the basis for sustainable development. Disaster resilience is not included as one of those 17 Sustainable Development Goals, but it is mentioned in many of them and is part of the overall goals. If you don’t have disaster resilience once you are hit by some kind of disaster, that’s a very acute, disruptive, thing for sustainable development, it will be very difficult for them to recover from that disaster.

GFCC: What are your recommendations on how to make sure that disaster resilience is incorporated into sustainable development?

Prof. Hayashi: Many people say resilience is the power or ability to bounce back from adversity, but I believe that disaster resilience includes two things, both an ability to prevent damage from happening and an ability to recover from any damage that happened. The real essence of disaster resilience is the combination or integration of these two options to prepare for disasters.

GFCC: When you’re talking about disasters, how are you defining disaster in this context?

Prof. Hayashi: A disaster could be of any kind. It depends on what hazard you are focusing on. In my current capacity, my institution focuses on natural disasters of all kinds, but in the world the disaster could happen from various kinds of hazards, including cyber or physical, for example a health-related hazard, or a more intentional hazard like, terrorism. Since there are so many types of potential hazards, we should take an all-hazard approach.

GFCC: Besides natural disasters, in which socioeconomic areas do societies in Japan need to boost resilience to avoid future crises, particularly considering population decline in an aging society.

Prof. Hayashi: This is the first time that Japan has experienced a population decline and this has consequences of a rapid decrease in the working population. The real problem is that Japan has a very small and shrinking number of younger generations. This means Japan has a shrinking labor force. Japan does not have a very extensive immigration program so it cannot rely on an immigrant population to secure the working population.

GFCC: What are ways that Japan is trying to combat the effects of a declining population?

Prof. Hayashi: The very straightforward way is to have more babies. For this to happen, Japan needs to support reproducing-age generations through all kinds of social support programs and initiatives.

GFCC: What other socioeconomic areas in society are potentially being impacted?

Prof. Hayashi: Japan is expecting a very large scale catastrophic, earthquake and tsunami disaster around 2035. Japan has experienced an earthquake and tsunami every century since the seventh century as a written record. The estimate of damage due to the expected earthquake and tsunami disaster will be more than 10 times larger than the biggest natural disaster Japan has experienced since 1945.

GFCC: Outside of Japan, what is one of the types of disasters that we need to worry about or maybe that potentially isn’t getting enough attention?

Prof. Hayashi: Global warming has triggered various kinds of extreme weather. After the 1980s, we have experienced an increasing number of floods and extreme weather-related events, which affect the whole world very seriously. We need to adapt to climate change to make society sustainable.

GFCC: What is the importance of promoting a holistic approach to disaster resilience, including transdisciplinary research and social science?

Prof. Hayashi: We believe that disaster resilience can be defined as a function of both the hazard impact and the resilience of society. Disaster resilience capability can be defined in terms of five different kinds of help available in relation to disaster impact: Self help, which are the things each individual will do or actions taken to make their life more resilient; Individual purchase of merchandise or services available in the society to make individuals more resilient; Mutual help within their personal relationships; Institutional mutual help: insurance or mutual aid programs; Public help: made available by using taxes. These five kinds of help will not be enough by itself, so it is crucial to have a holistic approach that combines these five types of help together.

GFCC: Currently, is there infrastructure already in place that allows this help to be translated into the community and preparedness to be made aware?

Prof. Hayashi: Very recently various initiatives have started to promote resilience improvement. One example is called a Phase Free Movement. They try to develop various kinds of merchandises, which can be used when there are no disasters and when disaster strikes. An example is Plug In Electric Vehicles (PHEV) that function as a mode of transport during normal times, but in the case of a disaster when the power supply has stopped, the PHEV can function as a battery for the household. Any kind of multi or dual-use merchandise is preferred when it comes to value and being prepared for potential disasters.

GFCC: What roles do innovation and R&D play in disaster preparedness and resilience?

Prof. Hayashi: In Japan the public sector tends to be primarily responsible for disaster management. That being said, private sector intervention will be very important for further improvement of disaster resilience. The way the public sector will get involved and behave can become more innovative by providing something new. We expect private sector involvement will change the landscape of disaster management in Japan.

GFCC: Do you have an example of a recent innovation that the private sector has contributed?

Prof. Hayashi: One example of the private sector’s contribution occurred at the time of the East Japan earthquake in 2011. It was a very devastating disasters northern Japan Pacific coast due to a very large tsunami. Yamato Transport is a very innovative door-to-door delivery service company that increased its corporate social responsibility (CSR) by contributing part of their profit from delivering a package. Yamato decided to donate 10 yen per delivery, which is about 25% of their profit. As a result, after one year they contributed 150 million U.S. dollars. Then they formed a committee to decide which organizations or initiatives should get funding. Almost all of the donations went to promoting the recovery of the local businesses. This allowed donations to be made to initiatives that could not be subsidized by government money. It was a social innovation delivered by a private company.

GFCC: What is the role of communication in resilience planning in Japan?

Prof. Hayashi: The goal is for us to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. To do so, it is very important for everyone to have a proper understanding about disasters. This means understanding one’s hazard exposure, vulnerability, and preparedness. This is not taught in formal educational programs, so people need to get an understanding through other sources. The main sources are media and other communication tools. Since Japan is not a very large country, natural disasters or, disasters of any kind get lots of national attention. Communication is the key for improving resilience.

GFCC: What has the NIED done to communicate science to local communities and enhance public opinion support for disaster resilience?

Prof. Hayashi: NIED creates and provides scientific information and data with professional organizations as their prime target. Over the last seven years NIED has been trying to be more informative for the general public, especially the population at risk.The NIED makes use of the internet as a main source of information and media so that when disaster strikes all kinds of information including hazard status, damage status, and response status will be disseminated and compiled to all stakeholders through the internet. A year ago, NIED started a service to provide personalized information to support individual decision making. NIED hopes to promote this kind of personalized service for the private sector to protect their business.

GFCC: How can societies prepare their capacities to be able to innovate in a period of crisis?

Prof. Hayashi: Enhancing information and the understanding of disaster will improve resilience. Japan has spent lots of money and effort for a long time to improve the prevention capacity; mainly, focused on structural mitigation capacity. What we can do further is supplement the above efforts with non-structural mitigation and preparedness for what might happen. Non-structural mitigation and preparedness both require very active involvement of all stakeholders, which leads to the importance of communication.

GFCC: How can we turn disasters into opportunities for innovation?

Prof. Hayashi: Resilience will be a function of both a hazards intensity and resilience capability of the entity. When the hazard comes an entity may behave in three different ways.The first way an entity reacts is in an absorptive manner, meaning there are no obvious changes. The second way is a adaptive curve, meaning when the hazard occurs, the entity changes form temporarily, but when the hazard is gone it goes back to its original form. The third one is a transformative reaction. When the hazard strikes the entity changes its behavior from pre-hazard, which could be better or worse than the way it used to be. Disaster impact is a chance for change and for making our society better in terms of transformative action. To make transformative action possible it is necessary to have a future image (an image different than the current image or reality) shared by those who will be impacted by the hazard. Additionally, I would like to mention that the window of opportunity is not that long to make change after a disaster, so it is crucial to have the future image prepared ahead of any disaster striking.