2018•12•06     Tokyo

On 1 November 2018, UNU-IAS hosted an interim report meeting for the second term of the Grant for Global Sustainability (GGS), consisting of a reporting session and an examination.
The Grant for Global Sustainability (GGS) is an initiative supporting research, launched in 2015 with support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). GGS supports the work of three educational and research institutes in Japan, covering three thematic areas (“Inclusive Development”, “Earth Science”, and “Cities and Residential Areas”) and aiming to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Concerning the three projects in progress at present, interim reports were presented by Nagoya University, Kyoto University and Ibaraki University. Upon examining the reports, the review board granted the three projects a further year for implementation.
Progress reports (in Japanese ONLY) are available under the RELATED FILES tab.

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Theme 1: Education and governance to achieve inclusive development

Nagoya University
Project Title: Knowledge and skills which lead to decent work: The development of a skills assessment module for TVET graduates and curriculum evaluation in developing countries
This project, with the objective to improve the applicability of skills training in Africa to the real needs of the labor market, aims to develop a module for assessing supply-demand gaps of expectation for skills and for improving the relevance of training, through case studies in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Ghana based on a comparative analysis, tracer study, and reliability test. It targets the creation of a module which will be applicable beyond specific national and industrial contexts. As of the end of 2018, the project has completed the trial usage of the module developed and its improvement in Japan and completed the test and evaluation of 300 – 500 participants in each country using the module. Local partners and stakeholders have expressed strong interest in the results of the evaluation in order to apply it in their national policies on skills development.
(Project site: Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa)

Theme 2: Solutions to the challenges faced by the Earth’s systems

Graduate School of Agriculture, National University Corporation, Kyoto University
Project Title: Incorporation of biodiversity indicators into ecosystem-services forest certification towards achieving synergy between biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest use
This project will empirically examine and resolve the technical issues of the “Forest Certification for Ecosystem Services (ForCES)” which was developed by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) by incorporating biodiversity-mapping techniques into the auditing procedure of ForCES in Indonesia and Malaysia to contribute to the sustainable conservation and management of tropical forest and biodiversity. It will also verify positive influences of the issuance of ForCES certification on various stakeholders to determine whether ForCES is adoptable. In Indonesia, the ForCES approach which the project has advanced by incorporating biodiversity-mapping techniques has been applied to examine the Ratah Timber company to certify its non-negative influence on the local ecosystem, the first case in the world.
(Project site: Malaysia and Indonesia)

Theme 3: Solutions to the challenges encountered by cities and residential areas

Ibaraki University
Project Title: Strategies for adaptation to sea level rise in urban atolls through conservation and rehabilitation of natural processes of island formation
This project aims to develop and implement environmental measures and technologies for the conservation and rehabilitation of sand production processes for healthy island formation to counter rising sea level in the Majuro Atoll and to develop a method for pollution load reduction in septic tanks and sewage pipelines, conservation area maps, and an integrated urban area-groundwater-lagoon model which can predict water quality in the lagoon given values of pollution loads from the urban area. However, results have revealed that it is also important to look at the negative influence of water pollution on sea algae where benthic foraminifera inhabits. The local administration requested the project to design and develop environmental measures to control the construction of revetment by the local people as well as coral excavation. The project, therefore, will adjust the planned outputs to develop further measures and include them in the adaptation strategy.
(Project site: Marshall Islands)