Project Background and Objectives

People's perception of the environment affects their value judgments of the environment as a basis to determine their attitudes toward it. We define this value judgment system as the "environmental consciousness." People use or modify their environment based on their environmental consciousness. Each individual's environmental consciousness is influenced not only by human-sociological factors, but also by the changes in environmental qualities. The project will concentrate on exploring the changes in the environmental consciousness induced by the modification of the environment.

In order to understand the present situation of the environment and to predict its future it is necessary to grasp the environmental quality as quantitative evaluation of environmental elements. Clarifying the relationship between the environmental quality and people's environmental consciousness is an important task for wise-use and conservation of natural environment. When an environment is considerably modified, an environmental assessment with public involvement is necessary. To make the public involvement substantive, people must be informed of the present situation of the environment concerned and on the predicted environmental impacts. Such information must be presented in a way that people can easily understand to reconsider their lifestyle.

Environmental specialists have conventionally done the environmental education using the translation from the scientific terminology to ordinary language. Is such one-way connection between people's and specialists appropriate for people to create the future environment and their lives? Specialists should not only concern with how to convey their scientific information to the people but also with how people would understand the information and express their desired future environment in non-scientific expressions. On the other hand, non-specialist people must self-consciously evaluate the environment by exchanging the information with specialists. However, there has been no attempts to develop a framework that supports the active information exchange between specialists and non-specialists.

In this project, the framework will be considered from the conceptual point of view to develop a methodology for identifying a set of environmental elements, which affect the people's environmental consciousness. The schematic diagram of the relationship between people and specialist focused in this project is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Specialists abstract environments with terminology., while people percept and express environments using everyday expressions. In the conventional environmental education, the flow of information about the environment was only from specialist to the people in one-way translation of academic information into plain words. However, the collaborative relationship between them with bilateral exchange of information is necessary to create the people's desired future environment. In this project, a methodology for the bilateral information exchange will be developed.

In the project, the relationship between changing value judgments and environmental quality will be analyzed in a forest-lake ecosystem. The methodology to be developed requires several functions: (1) quantitative prediction of changes in environmental elements caused by virtual environmental modifications, such as logging and dairy farming, (2) informing appropriately the environmental changes to people and (3) analysis of the relationship between changes in the people's value judgment and in the environmental elements (Figure 2). IDEA will be developed as a main tool that provides all the functions above.

Figure 2. Response-prediction model predicts the changes in the environmental elements when a virtual environmental modification is applied to the environment concerned. Transformation module translates the predicted changes into plain words that are used in the questionnaire to people. Data derived from the questionnaire survey are analyzed, and some of the results will be fed back to the new set of questionnaire. From the relation between changes in the environmental elements and changes in the people's evaluation on the environment, a set of environmental elements affecting the people's environmental valuation will be identified. Repeated questionnaire survey with increasingly focused questions will untangle the complexities of the interactions among environmental elements and the formation of people's consciousness.

Using a response-prediction model in IDEA, changes in environmental elements based on the virtual modifications in watershed (Figure 3) are quantitatively estimated. Predicted environmental changes are transformed into plain words by the transformation module. Changes in the peoples' environmental consciousness are detected by questionnaire surveys. Survey data are analyzed with IDEA and to be reflected in new questionnaires. Through bilateral information exchanges between people and specialists, substantial knowledge about the relationship between environmental consciousness and environmental elements will be gained from IDEA.

IDEA is targeted to be used in the environmental policy-making. In the procedure for the planning and implementation of the environmental measure, the methods developed in this project will provide the bases to establish the mutual agreement for the measure concerned, keeping the sustainability and possibility for future generations.