Many rural areas in Yunnan province, PR China, have become tourist resorts since the latter half of the 1990s. Spontaneous, autonomous management of tourist facilities by local residents has become an important priority because tourism development through the construction of facilities by external developers does not necessarily contribute directly to increasing local residents' income levels and the development of local communities. Therefore the early achievement of autonomous management of tourist facilities is required. We investigated the formation process and joint management of tourist areas around Lake Lashihai in northwest Yunnan province, where farmers of the Naxi tribe operate autonomous equestrian tourism facilities. The results clarified that they manage the horse riding facilities democratically by distributing the profits equally and selecting a leader through the electoral process, contributing to an increase in their income levels.

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The Upo swamp, which was registered as a Ramsar Convention wetland in 1998, is the second Ramsar wetlands site in the Republic of Korea. This research aimed to clarify the process of Ramsar wetlands registration and the local governance established afterward for the environmental conservation of the Upo swamp, focusing on the impacts on local residents' livelihoods and their perception of the Ramasar registration.
In the process of the Ramsar registration as well as the crested ibis breeding grounds project, the conservation activities for the Upo swamp have been implemented in a top-down style. Moreover, ecological virtues have been overemphasized in the establishment of local environmental governance for the Upo swamp, paying little attention to coexistence with local residents. This has resulted in significant spatial segregation between the conserved Ramsar site (the Upo swamp) and the surrounding villages in the Upo area, although residents have interacted for hundreds of years with the Upo swamp for their livelihoods. The local residents have been frustrated by this bureaucratic protectionism. They agree on the importance of wetlands protection, although they feel that they have not sufficiently participated in the benefit sharing from the Ramsar registration, in spite of a huge increase in tourist numbers to about 800,000 per year. The potential for tourism in the Upo swamp is evaluated very highly, with its rich biodiversity and beautiful landscape. Benefit-sharing mechanisms with local residents should be established in the Upo area, while conserving its environmental virtues.

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Education for sustainable development (ESD) is an important theme in geographical education. The International Geographical Union Commission on Geographical Education (IGU-CGE) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geographie (DGfG) have developed declarations and educational standards on ESD and promoted it in geographical education. The IGU-CGE stated that the approach to social and environmental transformation is an important component of the declarations. ESD and the IGU-CGE's geographical education have common features in terms of social transformation, and geographical competencies described in the declarations contain elements of it. The IGU-CGE requests that each country adopt the contents of the declarations, and the curricula for geographical education in Germany reflect them. ESD is also one of the important themes of geographical education in Germany, and the educational standard in Germany under the DGfG is based on elements of ESD and original German viewpoints.

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This paper briefly introduces the method and results of Regional Population Projections for Japan: 2010–2040 published in March 2013 by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. We demonstrate that a population projection using the cohort component method maintains reasonably high accuracy, at least for the near future. For the results of the projection by 2025, population declines in municipalities in nonmetropolitan areas will accelerate, and rapid population aging in the suburbs around metropolitan areas will be unavoidable. We emphasize that because deaths will increase in metropolitan areas after population aging, populations in metropolitan areas will decline following the declines in nonmetropolitan areas.

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