Water quality change and environmental policy making process of Lake Biwa

Dr. Naoko Hirayama (Japan)

Assistant Professor, Kanazawa University

Lake Biwa is the largest lake and the greatest water resource in Japan. It supplies drinking and industrial water to some 14 million residents around and downstream of the lake including those in such megalopolises as Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe Cities.

In L. Biwa and its catchment area, the environment has been deteriorating multiply due to the development of industries and changes in land use and people’s lifestyle since the high-growth period of the 1950s. L. Biwa has many kinds of values not only as water resources but also as nurturing unique ecosystem and creating its exceptional culture and landscape. Therefore, we have to carry over to the next generation L. Biwa in sound shape.

Shiga Prefectural Government (SPG) drew up in 2000 the “Mather Lake 21 (ML21) Plan” as a long-term comprehensive conservation plan for L. Biwa. Aiming for human beings to live in coexistence with the lake, the plan sets down the future vision of the lake in 2050, and the planning periods of phase I for 2000-2010 and phase II for 2011-2020. The plan also identified three target fields such as “Improving Water Quality”, “Increasing Holding Capacity of Forests”, and “Restoring Ecosystem”, systematically laying out basic policies, goals, measures and projects for the conservation of the lake in each field. Toward the second 10-year phase of the plan, which will start from 2011, SPG reviewed and revised the plan in 2008-2010. The main feature of the ML21 Plan’s revision process was that public involvement programs such as questionnaire surveys, WSs, and so forth were implemented by the Academic Committee deliberately at drafting stage.

This presentation inducts with two subjects pertaining to tools for meaningful citizen participation in lake basin governance, one being the application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to the result of a general opinion survey on the value of Lake Biwa to obtain the properly weighted citizen sentiment that could be meaningfully integrated into a planning process, and another being the development of a visualization method of workshop elaborations that helps clarify how the workshop elaborations were made.

Development of Simulation Models for Planning Support of Sustainable Urban Development

Yan MA(Japan)*, Zhenjiang SHEN

*PhD Candidate,

Graduate school of Natural Science& Technology, Kanazawa University

This research targets to supply decision makers in urban planning area with planning support models. These models are developed on Constraint Cellular Automata (CCA) approach or Multi-Agent System (MAS) approach, which are respectively developed for planning support of different policies relating to urban growth, downtown revitalization, location making of community-based facilities and meanwhile, domestic water management.

Thetool developed in this work can visualize the process of urban growth in the future and predict the possible energy demand and waste discharge resulted from urban growth. For simulating household mobility, we can reflect the changes of households' life cycle stages. Through policy interactions between household agents, this tool can also be used to visualize the policy effects of a residence promotion policy on downtown revitalization during urban decline stage. Besides considering land use change and household mobility, we alsosimulate location choices of housings and city facilities during different urban development stageswhile considering environmental issues such as water resources and consumption for sustainable development.