Climate Change Policy in Japan

From the 1980s to 2015

Yasuko Kameyama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367186722
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317559429
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amidst growing environmental concerns worldwide, Japan is seen as particularly vulnerable to the effects of changing climate. This book considers Japan's response to the climate change problem from the late 1980s up to the present day, assessing how the Japanese government's policy-making process has developed over time. From the early days of climate change policy in Japan, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences and Kyoto Protocol, right up to the 2015 negotiations, the book examines the environmental, economic, and political factors that have shaped policy. As the 2015 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change projects forward beyond 2020, the book concludes by analyzing how Japan has placed itself in the global climate change debate and how the country might and should respond to the problem in the future, based on the findings from accumulated history.

1 Framing Japan’s response to climate change

Overview

Haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana

(Spring ocean / swaying gently / all day long)

Buson Yosa

The Yosa poem is a renowned haiku from the eighteenth century. The beauty of four distinct seasons has long been at the heart of Japanese culture. In haiku, poets attempt to express their deepest emotions by describing nature in simple and beautiful language in the style of a short poem with three lines consisting of five, seven, and five syllables. In Buson Yosa’s haiku, he was expressing a typical day in spring with calm waves and warm sunshine.

Spring 2015 in Japan was not the spring Buson described three centuries ago. Early April was as cold as midwinter, with snowfall in Tokyo. Then strong winds and rainfalls hit record highs in scattered areas around Japan. The cold spring was followed by clear days in early May, with temperatures reaching record highs; the amount of rainfall was only about 60% of the long-term average for May.

Summer was also very irregular, starting with extremely hot temperatures for three weeks from late July to mid-August. Temperatures then dropped to below 20 °C, which is much cooler than usual and would not usually be observed until mid-October in Japan. The cool spell was followed by an unprecedented amount of rainfall in the northern Kanto area in early September, which led to serious flooding across a wide area. Most Japanese feel that the climate is changing, and many of them are aware of the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” Despite these extreme weather patterns and a basic knowledge about of climate change, there is little enthusiasm, if any, among the Japanese people and government to start taking actions to address the climate change problem.

This chapter gives an overall introduction to the book. It explains the aim of the book and where the book stands among the large amount of literature related to climate change policy-making in general, focusing on the spectrum across which past literature has primarily concentrated. It also reviews how other published works have dealt with climate change policy-making in Japan.

Aim of this book

Few will deny that climate change has now become one of the most serious global environmental problems and that it requires a global solution (Gore 1993). Climate change alters not only average global temperature but also a series of climate-related events, such as precipitation and wind patterns. These changes have other environmental and ecological consequences, including desertification and loss of biological diversity, all of which directly or indirectly affect living conditions today and in the future.

A global response is required to mitigate climate change, and it has occurred mainly at the multilateral level. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 and entered into force in 1994. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and entered into force in 2005. Ongoing negotiations for the time periods beyond the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008–2012) resulted in a political declaration known as the Copenhagen Accords (agreed upon in 2009), which paved a way for countries to move forward, mostly voluntarily, through 2020. The contents of the Copenhagen Accord were anchored to the UNFCCC process as Conference of the Parties (COP) decisions in 2010 in the Cancun Agreement. A new round of negotiations was initiated by the Durban Platform in 2011, which engaged all countries to take part in the newly agreed-upon outcome; the aim was to conclude the agreement in 2015 at COP21. Japan has consistently been engaged in these multilateral negotiations from the early stages in the late 1980s to the present.

Japan’s emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is not negligible. With about 2% of the world’s population, Japan has been responsible for about 3% to 4% of global emissions. It ranked fourth in GHG emissions in the 1980s, although that ranking has gradually decreased in the past two decades because of growing emissions in some emerging economies. Even though its overall rank has decreased, Japan has been one of the world’s major economies since the 1980s, and other countries expect it to play a major role in international affairs, especially regarding climate change.

It has generally been difficult to fully understand how and why Japan has made certain decisions concerning climate change, particularly for many non-Japanese audiences. This is true for several reasons. First and foremost, analyses of Japan’s foreign policy have generally tended to emphasize Japan’s uniqueness. For many observers, “Japan appears anomalous, if not aberrant or abnormal, in terms of its international behaviour” (Hook et al. 2012: 68). Japan’s foreign policy has also been traditionally perceived as reactive, whereas that of other industrialized countries is considered more or less proactive (Calder 1988; Inoguchi 1991). Similar observations can be made for Japan’s response to climate change. It is not clear to outside observers how key decision-making individuals and other stakeholders perceive climate change as an issue, how they use logic to arrive at decisions, and why some key factors in other countries do not exert the same level of influence in Japan. There is also little transparency with respect to the process by which the major players in the decision-making process consolidated their final decisions, including the information chosen to be considered and the reasons why some elements of the climate change problem have been ignored.

Also, most relevant literature and publicly available information on the climate change debate in Japan is written in Japanese, which restricts access to much of the non-Japanese audience. Finally, most Japanese people seem to perceive climate change as an economic and energy issue, rather than as an environmental, ethical, development, or diplomatic issue. Thus, there is a kind of common understanding among Japanese people when discussing climate change, even though the Japanese dialogue does not always seem to properly fit into the climate change policy puzzle in the multilateral arena. This point of view will be explored later in the book in following chapters.

The primary purpose of this book is, therefore, to examine the trajectory of Japan’s decision-making processes regarding responses to the climate change problem. It focuses particularly on high-ranking politicians to examine how they approached climate change and how they perceived climate change in relation to other political, economic, and social issues. Because climate change is related to many other national issues, politicians may have dealt with issues that were not strictly related to climate change per se, but that were nonetheless relevant.

A country’s decisions regarding climate change are affected by many factors, such as scientific findings and economic conditions. Key influential factors can change over time, depending on specific conditions. In the rest of this chapter, I examine key factors that have influenced Japan’s decision-making on climate change policies in the past three decades and note how these factors have evolved over time. I also identify the factors that are unique to Japan and those that are common across countries.

What is the climate change problem?

The climate change mechanism is a phenomenon that can be explained by physical processes. The climate change problem, however, is not merely a physical phenomenon; it is a problem that entails political, economic, and social dimensions. The problem, therefore, can be framed in a variety of ways depending on which dimension is being regarded as the central concern. To investigate Japan’s response to climate change, it is necessary to delineate suitable dimensions in the Japanese context of climate change. Generally, climate change dimensions can be categorized in three types: environmental, economic, and foreign policy.

Climate change as an environmental issue

Climate change is no doubt a global environmental problem. It is a mechanism through which people’s use of fossil fuel energy, destruction of forests, and emission of other GHGs such as fluorocarbon gases has led to an increase in concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere. Through this increase, more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, resulting in gradual warming in terms of global average temperature and more severe weather patterns at the regional and local levels.

Scientists have helped formalize the founding basis for multilateral cooperation to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published five assessment reports thus far, and their findings have shown continuous upward trends of atmospheric concentration of GHGs, a global temperature rise, and a higher frequency of extreme weather events (IPCC 2015). From an environmental conservation perspective, the aim is to restrict the temperature increase to a long-term goal of 2 °C, or even of 1.5 °C, a target that was agreed upon in 2010 as an element of the Cancun Agreement (UNFCCC 2010) and in 2015 by the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2015). To reach this goal, it is estimated that total global GHG emissions need to be reduced by half of those in the 1990s (G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit 2008). The mean global temperature has already risen by about 0.85 °C, suggesting the difficulty involved in reaching this goal within a set timeframe (IPCC 2015).

Meanwhile, there are some climate change “deniers” who state that, although climate change may be occurring, it is not because of anthropogenic GHG emissions or that it is not a serious problem. Debates between supporters and deniers of climate change science often include discussion of the political and economic dimensions of the problem (Bradley 2011; Giddens 2009; Jacques 2012).

Japan’s climate is already changing. The annual average temperature in Japan in 2014 was 0.14 °C higher than the annual average from 1989 to 2014. In addition, the long-term trend shows a temperature increase of 1.14 °C in the last century (Figure 1.1) (Meteorological Agency 2015). Although the amount of rainfall tends to vary from year to year, the occurrence of extreme events (i.e., too much or too little rain) has been increasing in the last decade. Although it does not directly refer to climate change, the latest White Paper from the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) notes an increasing frequency of tremendously concentrated rainfall in limited areas and powerful typhoons and tornados, leading to increased damage incurred by these extreme weather patterns (FDMA 2014). For example, more than 40,000 people have been hospitalized for heat stroke each year since 2010. The number had been less than 10,000 in the previous years.

Climate change as an economic/energy issue

Among a variety of types of GHGs identified by scientists, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the main target that needs to be addressed to avoid dangerous consequences of global warming on our climate and ecosystem. Reduction of CO₂ emissions is also the core issue of climate change problem in terms of the economic dimension. There are assertions that a reduction in energy use would hamper economic growth (White House 2001). The term “burden sharing,” an expression often used in discussions on ways to set emission reduction targets across countries (particularly in the early years of negotiations), clearly indicates people’s recognition that emission reduction is a burden (Ringius et al. 2002). This debate very much depends upon how “economy” and “cost” are defined. In terms of growth of gross domestic product (GDP), there is generally a positive relationship between growth in CO₂ emissions and GDP, but “decoupling” between the two has also been observed in some countries and time periods (Grubb 2014). Decoupling tends to occur in countries where the energy price is relatively high and where the diffusion of new technology has occurred. The economic cost of climate change mitigation itself is a complicated notion. At least some extra expenditure would have to be made if a new, less-carbon-intensive technology were to be installed all at once in a short timeframe. This is perceived as an economic cost or burden in the short term. For example, for many individuals, an increase in the price of gasoline or electricity would not be welcome, because they will perceive this as an increased household “cost.”

Figure 1.1 Annual average temperature and long-term trend

Many studies have calculated the total economic cost of reducing GHG emissions worldwide (IPCC 2014: Chapter 6), but the estimates are wide ranging, primarily because of the diversity of various underlying assumptions. Examples include the prospects for future population and economic growth with and without climate change mitigation policies, the price of crude oil, possible utilization of innovative technologies, and the availability of renewable and nonrenewable energy resources.

Decreased energy consumption, however, also saves money, and many energy-saving actions have yet to be implemented. From this perspective, expenditures required to save energy should be considered as investments that may end up saving money in the long term. The benefit of cost saving through the reduced use of energy increases when the prices of fossil fuel resources increase. From a government’s fiscal policy perspective, reducing subsidies for fossil fuels is a climate change mitigation policy that actually reduces government expenditure (IEA 2015: 81). Many developing countries used to operate energy subsidies to support the poor, but the use of subsidies has been re-evaluated in many countries in recent years.

From an industry perspective, many fossil fuel industries such as the coal and oil industries and many other energy-intensive industries such as the iron and steel, aluminum, and cement sectors are likely to be negatively affected economically by GHG emission reduction policies. These industries are, in many cases, politically powerful and have influenced national governments’ behavior on climate change policy in many countries (Gelbspan 2005). On the other hand, there are emerging industries such as those related to renewable energy and low-carbon technologies that could benefit by ambitious emission-reduction policies. The notions of “green growth” or a “green economy” aim to express the concept that sustainable economic activity and environmental conservation can be achieved simultaneously (Stern 2013). In general, the overall impact of climate change mitigation policies on a country’s economy needs to be viewed from many perspectives.

Climate change as a diplomatic/foreign-policy issue

Climate change is a long-term policy problem that lasts at least one generation, exhibits scientific uncertainty, and engenders a public goods aspect at the stage of problem generation and at the response stage, both at the global level (Sprinz 2009). When it comes to multilateral negotiations, it can be a contentious issue between rich and poor countries. Past CO₂ emissions are mostly from rich developed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Framing Japan’s response to climate change
• 2 Emergence of the climate change problem and adoption of the UNFCCC (1980s–1994)
• 3 COP3 and the Kyoto Protocol (1995–2002)
• 4 Struggling to find the “post-Kyoto” regime, 2002–2010
• 5 The Tohoku earthquake and reconsideration of Japan’s energy policies (2011–2015)
• 6 Conclusion
• Annex 1: Chronicle of Japan’s climate change policy
• Index