2019 Volume 32 Issue 2 Pages 75-82
Recently, environmental and social considerations for policy and plan level, upstream strategic decision-making, have been more important as well as the conventional project level. In this context, environmental impact assessment (EIA) studies have proposed Sustainability Assessment (SA) as the tool for comprehensive assessment including environmental, social, economic aspects. But little is available on the specific methods for SA in Japan since the Japanese EIA system is oriented towards just environmental aspects. In this paper, we described a conceptual methodology using Geographic Information System (GIS) for SA of long-term land use planning and consensus building for geothermal development by referring to the existing related researches. Through these considerations, we discussed the enhancement effects on the planning communication caused by application of information technology to the SA. As the results, we demonstrated that the applications of GIS to SA enable a public participation and planning communication in high abstraction degree of strategic decision-making level by the visualizations of future land use scenario and underground geological risk information as the output of alternatives and/or evaluations in SA.
