Current research

We define "inclusive sustainability" as sustainability achieved through an inclusive harmony between the autonomy of the global environment and the autonomy of the economic and social systems that make up that environment. To achieve inclusive sustainability, we aim to assess the impact of policies on the basis of an understanding of the complex interactions between the environment, the economy, and society ^[1].

To recognize the inclusive mechanisms linking the environment and society, it is necessary to view the structure of various chains of events through comprehensive systems thinking. As for the circulatory systems that are made computable, it is also necessary to clarify system states and properties such as stability (equilibrium/non-equilibrium) and emergent properties.

It is problematic that traditional social-growth indicators such as GDP cannot assess environmental and social sustainability. We are therefore focusing on the three capitals (product capital, human capital, and natural capital) that compose "Inclusive Wealth" (IW), which has been attracting attention in recent years as a sustainability indicator, and we are developing a model that can evaluate the sustainability of environmental and social circulatory systems. We will evaluate the effectiveness of a new growth indicator, called "inclusive wealth index" (IWI), by (i) creating the model on a computational processing platform by using "system dynamics" technology for actual social-issue use cases and (ii) reproducing the impact of local policies on the global environmental and social-state transitions in the form of an "emergence mechanism" .

[1] NTT announces new R&D projects of Digital Twin Computing - Four grand challenges towards a new future world creating harmonized relationship between the Earth, society, and people - , NTT News Release November 13, 2020