17 Environment This chapter contains statistics on greenhouse gases, waste disposal, atmospheric pollution, sewage and water quality and public hazards. Environment The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), among others, are developing environmental indicators. The "PSR model", 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 model" OECD has developed the "PSR model" to be used as a conceptual scheme to arrange the environmental information and put it together into indicators. The model 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 response for it". Based on this PSR model, the OECD has created groups of indicators such as "core set indicators", "environmental indicators by sector", and "decoupling environmental indicators", which are used to understand the relationship between human activities and the environment. The elements of the "PSR model" 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. Emission of greenhouse gases The data source is the "Emission of greenhouse gases in Japan" which is compiled by the Ministry of the Environment as an administrative material. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, the concentration of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane, dinitrogen monoxide, and alternative CFCs) in the atmosphere has increased sharply due to the use of fossil fuels in human activities and the depletion of forests. This rapid increase in greenhouse gases has intensified the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, which is thought to be the cause of global warming. Of the greenhouse gases emitted by Japan, carbon dioxide emissions accounted for approximately 91% of the total (in FY 2020). 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 the Third Conference of the Parties (COP3), 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 400 17 環境
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