This paper aims to discuss the possibility that various information and communication technologies (ICT) should be effectively utilized and progressed in environmental science. For this purpose, at first, introducing the most important concept of “super smart society” in the 5th Japan’s Science and Technology Basic Plan (Cabinet approval in 2016), the advanced information and telecommunications network society in recent Japan was described, and the role of social media GIS in such a society was pointed out. Based on these, as one of the studies utilizing ICT in environmental science and disaster management, the development and practical application of a social media GIS as a disaster information system, which integrated Social media and Web-GIS into a single system, assuming the measures of prevention and reduction against earthquakes. Additionally, referring the examples of other academic fields, the possibility and limitation of ICT utilization in environmental science were discussed. Finally, briefly describing the outlines of the author’s recent studies using ICT, the following two future research issues are summarized. (1) the developed systems should be applied and implemented in environmental science, (2) various technologies in information engineering should be adopted in environmental science to develop a new academic field.

This study intended to create the watershed environment database compiled by recalculating some mesh data in the 1990s and the 2010s, and to discuss comparatively regional characteristics of Japanese major 109 river basins by analyzing land use type and water supply-demand estimation of the basins based on the database. Land use type changed in 13 river basins from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the changing patterns varied basin to basin. While both agricultural and residential water demands in Japan as a whole have decreased since the 1990s, some river basins have experienced water demand increase. River basins that experienced the increase of agricultural water demand are located in eastern part of Japan. The increase is not brought about by agricultural area expansion but the increase of water requirement per area. On the other hand, river basins that experienced the increase of residential water demand are located in main urban areas in Hokkaido, Tohoku, Chugoku, and Shikoku Regions. This fact shows that water demand gap between urban area and the surrounding area has expanded. Water supply-demand ratio has great differences among river basins. To manage the stable water supply, despite such regional differences of water balance, one possible solution is the cooperation between a river basin with high water supply-demand ratio and a river basin with low water supply-demand ratio.

Recently, local government officials from various offices have been discussing methods to ensure the sustainability of Japan’s sewage system, which is threatened by the deterioration of river-basin sewerage, an aging population, and population decline. This study aims to analyze the sustainability of river-basin sewerage using micro estimated future population data. First, we developed polygon data for each treatment district of Japan’s river-basin sewerage, as there is currently no such open data. Second, micro estimated future population data for each building location were spatially joined to the polygon data, making it possible to analyze the sustainability of every treatment district based on future estimated population and the planned population for each sewage project. As a result, we can expect to maintain the future population of each treatment district in order to expand them appropriately. At the same time, it suggests that shrinking of the planned treatment district area is necessary to maintain river-basin sewerage depending on the future treatment district population. In order to promote further expansion and integration, it would be helpful to publish environmental data online including geospatial information in more detailed units than administrative areas as shown in this research.

This study reveals the house rent formation mechanism and introduces the unexpected relationship between the living environment and the market value of houses across Japan. We first developed the micro geodata that contains the distribution of all housing buildings across Japan. In addition, we built a database that can evaluate the house values throughout Japan by integration of the 82 kinds of rent formation factor and information on minimum guaranteed rent given by spatial unit of the postal code with the micro geodata. Moreover, by aggregating this database by postal code unit, clustering it by the k-means ＋＋ method, and sparse modeling for each cluster, we developed a method to automatically reveal the rent formation factor which contributes positively or negatively to the minimum guaranteed rent for each cluster. As a result, it was shown that the determinant of the market value of the housing is not necessarily dominant whether the living environment is good or bad. In particular, it can be said that the rent formation factors on disaster risk should ring the alarm as a situation to be rectified because there were many areas that did not necessarily receive the impact of disaster risk other than flooding.

This paper reports the overview of research stream regarding the post-modern public participation and the current situation of public participation implementation in Kutsuki district, Takashima city. The current research of public participation put importance not only on the scientific approach and procedural fairness such as meaningful reply among the stakeholders, but also on the understanding the facts from the multi-sided viewpoints and making action plan based on the shared fact understandings and the individual situations. To understand the trend of the existing research, this paper set two axes named “planning process” and “information processing.” Based on the dimensions, the characteristics of the participation design have been analyzed such as “joint-fact-finding” and “gaming simulation.” In addition, the implementation has been described about public participation to planning process in Kutsuki district, Takashima city, Japan, in which the authors are conducting the action-research. From the descriptions, the authors analyzed three methods’ characteristics, the achievement through the implementations and the problem to overcome in the future actions.

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.