Present State and Problems of Regional Environmental Management Plans

Abstract

Environmental problems are becoming complex and expanding. In such situation, it is important to make planning approaches for resolving not only present but also future environmental problems. Most of the recent environmental problems are caused by activities in urbanized areas which include citizens' life as well as different industrial activities. Thus, the new approach requires not only traditional measures of regulation but also such new ones as economic or planning measures for changing the social system and citizens' life styles.Regional environmental management plans have been made in some local governments since around 1980 in Japan. But these plans are open to question as they are not made under any kind of law. Besides this, we can point out that these plans were not aware of citizen participation to these plans in the planning processes and implementation of them.Based on this consideration, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the problems of present regional environmental plans in Japan. Firstly, we collected the every plans concerning environment made by autonomies, and we classified them into three groups. These are environmental conservation plan, amenity-town plan environmental management plan.We found the major group of environmental plans have been changing during this period. Most of the regional environmental plans which were made in the early part of 1980s were simply made for conserving the natural environments. But recently regional environmental management plans which have the purposes of creating amenity as well as solving environmental problems are dominant. This change corresponds to the progress of urbanization and the change of the nature of environmental problems. Regional environmental management plans have much broader views for environment than the other plans such as environmental conservation plans or amenity-town plans.The regional environmental management plans should be made through citizen participation. It is important to promote communication between the planning body and the citizens for mutual understanding of plan itself and thier environment.But we found that some reports of regional environmental plans were written insufficiently from the view point of better communication with the citizens. In the case of the environmental management plans, they are more sufficient in this point than amenity-town plans and environmental conservation plans. But even in the case of environmental management plans, the categories such as “action program”, “description of present situation of the area” and “the outline of the plan” which are necessary for citizen participation to these plans are satisfied about 50% of the reports of them. Moreover, the other categories are satisfied only about 10 to 20%. Thus, it is necessary to make the planning reports much clearer. Further more, a lot of effort should be made to give the citizens much better access to these reports.