A questionnaire survey was conducted on changes in work and commuting conditions in the COVID-19 situation were surveyed with respect to teleworking, which is expected to reduce environmental impact. Respondents with telework experience in 2020 were sampled in Tokyo, which is highly rail-dependent area, and in Tochigi, which is highly car-dependent area.

Even during the period of maximum telework, there were few teleworkers who completely teleworked from home or used satellite offices, and many teleworkers worked in combining office work and home. The trend of continuous teleworkers in Tokyo was that many of them were in their 40 s, worked in the information and telecommunications industry, and had a long commuting time. Furthermore, a high percentage of them rearranged furniture or purchased new furniture for telecommuting. On the other hand, women and those in the education industry were the most frequent users only during the emergency declaration period.

In Tochigi, where the environmental burden of commuting is high due mainly to the use of automobiles, the frequency of commuting to work was high during telework period and the environmental burden associated with commuting resumed as well, as the employees returned to their traditional work style in November 2020 when the COVID-19 disaster subsided somewhat.

It is important to assess future changes in land use composition in Japan under multiple scenarios from various perspectives when considering national land policies. LIME3, an endpoint-type life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method developed in Japan, enables environmental impact assessment of the “occupation” and “transformation” of land use. This paper focused on the land use scenarios according to shared socio-economic pathways (SSP) and calculated the environmental impact amounts based on the change in land use composition throughout Japan for each future vision.

The environmental impact amount nationwide was calculated to be USD 1.51 billion in 2015, USD 0.940 billion in 2100 for SSP1 (Sustainability Scenario), and USD 0.674 billion in 2100 for SSP3 (Regional Rivalry Scenario). In all scenarios (SSP1–5), there was a downward trend in the impact amount with time. This is because building sites account for a large proportion of the impact amount, and building sites are determined based on population decline. SSP3 is assumed to be an unsustainable future vision and its decreasing trend in building sites is relatively large. Therefore, this calculation showed that the impact amount for SSP3 was smaller than that for SSP1, which was assumed to be a sustainable future vision.

We expanded the extended input-output table for analysis of next-generation energy systems for the year 2030 (IONGES, 2011 edition) to 9 regions. We created two inter-regional IONGES; the first is a table based on conservative assumptions (conservative case) and the other is a table that follows ambitious assumptions (ambitious case). The ambitious case reflects the results of calculations to minimize the cost of thermal power generation. This was done by avoiding curtailment of renewable energy output as far as possible by activating inter-regional power transmission. The total domestic production value of electricity in the two tables is the same as the real value for 2011. However, they differ in the composition ratio of power generation by region, power source type, and the amount of transmission between regions. Because the consumption activity of each region induces CO₂ emissions in all other regions, we calculated the amount of CO₂ induced directly and indirectly by each of the two cases. We found that the total CO₂ emissions resulting from final consumption in all regions decreased in the ambitious case. In the ambitious case, it was found that the CO₂ reduction effect in the supply chain of assembled goods and light industrial goods is high.