The purpose of this article is to overview the development of social considerations both at domestic and international levels in order to study the retarded situation of Japan and to propose the need for raising the Japanese system agreeable to the so-called international standard through her domestic legal changes. Surrounding constraints against the introduction of such social considerations in Japan can be understood as almost disappearing if we look at the establishment of relevant international principles, various declarations of CSR-related policies backed by Japanese industrial sector and the Government, recent changing attitudes of Japanese regional autonomies and so on. The author stresses the need for introduction of social considerations into Japanese environment impact system.

Biodiversity is no longer only an issue of biology or nature conservation, but it is interlinked to climate change, natural resources, poverty, population growth, and economic growth especially in developing countries. Corporations are expected to not only commit in these sustainable development agenda through social contribution but through transforming their ways of business. Leading multinational corporations are recognizing the need for an integrated approach to such sustainable development agendas. The article analyses the background and trend in the corporate social responsibility(CSR)realm in relation to contribution to biodiversity by corporate sector and looks at the current trend of bringing natural capital into economic and corporate decision making, and the role of multi- stakeholder engagement learning from the experiences in environmental impact assessment processes.

This research aimed to answer the following research questions: what are the current challenges related to social impact assessments (SIAs) in the context of Japanese assessments of interventions and how they could be solved. The intention to raise these questions were that clear recognition of domestic SIA problems and possible directions for their solution among Japanese SIA researchers and practitioners could be the first step to solve such domestic SIA problems. This analysis was made by reviewing the past literature related to Japanese SIA activities in academic journals and extracting their important issues and challenges. Based on the relevance of these challenges, this paper further reviewed the global SIA literature in relation to ideal SIA practices to find clues for solving the problems raised in past Japanese evaluation practices. The challenges of Japanese SIAs raised were the narrow scoping, inexistence of rigorous stakeholder analysis, ex-ante and ex-post mitigation procedures especially when there are negative impacts on stakeholders, and not thorough adoption of participatory approach and qualitative methods. To solve these problems, recommendations regarding the domestic discussions on finding a desirable scoping and procedures, such as the necessity of the mandatory inclusion of negative impacts in scoping if there are such negative impacts, and ex-ante and ex-post mitigation procedures were presented. Re-examination of scoping and procedures if necessary was recommended. In addition, the validity of the adoption of participatory approach and qualitative methods in SIAs, which are indispensable in democratic society, was discussed.

It has been thought that the home delivery services are not good rather than traditional store sale services from the points of environment and management. In this paper we had the main research question; whether home delivery service is good for environment and management or not? We focused on the data from consumers’ cooperative society with both home delivery and traditional store sales service. We used data of CO2 emissions and sales amount. We compared CO2 emissions per 1000yen of sales amount between home delivery and traditional store services. In conclusion, we found that the home delivery services were more environmental friendly rather than traditional store sale service in the comparison of CO2 emissions per 1000yen of sales amount. Additionally we discussed about the environmental indicators for Strategic Environmental Assessment from the above results.