17 Environment This chapter contains statistics on greenhouse gases, atmospheric pollution, waste disposal, public hazards, and water and sewage. Environment The United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), among others, are developing environmental indicators. The "PSR framework", which is proposed by OECD, is widely used by other international organisations and countries as the basis for developing their environmental indicators. The same framework is also used by the Ministry of the Environment, for compiling "Environmental Statistics". "PSR framework" of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) OECD has developed the "PSR framework" to be used as a conceptual scheme to arrange the environmental information and put it together into indicators. The framework is aimed at grasping the relationship between human activities and the environment through a flow of processes, PSR, namely, "Pressure on environment", "State of environment as a consequence" and "Social responses for it". And the environmental indicators of OECD, which are based on this PSR model, use the "core set" as a basic tool to comprehend the structure of environmental problems. The elements of the "PSR framework" are as follows. <1> Pressure on environment The indicators to measure the environmental pressure represent the pressure of human activities on the environment including natural resources. Here, the "pressure" includes underlying or indirect pressures (activities themselves and environmental fluctuations, etc.) as well as proximate or direct (use of resources, discharge of pollutants and wastes, etc.). <2> State of environment The indicators for the state of the environment are related to the quality of the environment and the qualitative and quantitative aspects of natural resources, reflecting the purpose of environmental policies. Moreover, the environmental indicators are designed to reveal the overall state of the environment and its change over time. Examples are the density of pollutants and the state of wild animals and natural resources. <3> Social response The social policy indicators show the degree with which society responds to the environmental problems. For example, they refer to environmental expenditure, environmental tax and subsidy, recycle of waste, etc. Discharge of greenhouse gases The data source is "On the discharge of greenhouse gases" which is compiled by the Ministry of the Environment as an administrative material. The artificial discharge of greenhouse gases has potential effects that make earth's surface temperature rise, which may carry consequences on climate, the rise of sea level and on agriculture. The rise of earth's temperature is mostly caused by carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons (Freon), nitrogen oxide (NOx), and methane gas, among which the carbon dioxide plays the major role. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in May 1992, aiming at ultimately stabilising the density of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and it came into effect in March 1994. In December 1997, member countries of the Convention held COP3 or the Third Conference of the Parties, in Kyoto and adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect in February 2005. It stipulates a legally binding promise with numerical targets on the discharge of greenhouse gases among developed countries and provides an international mechanism to achieve the targets. The promise of Japan for the greenhouse gas reduction as agreed upon in the Kyoto convention is a 6 percent reduction in total amount by the period between 2008 and 2012 against the 1990 benchmark for carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, and against the 1995 benchmark for 396 17 環境
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