There is no doubt about the necessity of improving our societies to sustainable ones in the coming century. Limits of the resources available on the earth and the capacity of the natural ecosystem to cope with the damages imposed upon by the human activities are getting more and more clarified in details. Nonetheless, anthropogenic activities are expected to become more and more intensified and population explosion especially in the developing countries is anticipated to add further burden to the global natural ecosystems. Natural ecosystems are based upon hierarchical combination of fragile unit processes of various natures and various time constants and this is the reason why the once-destructed ecosystems are hardly recovered to the original forms. Sustainability came into a focus of environmental issues since UNCED was held at Rio in 1992. Prior to that, World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) defined sustainable development, as the development which satisfy the needs of current generations without suppressing the possible needs of the future generations. As stated before, the need for sustainability arose from the increase of the impact of human activities on the natural environment. Thus it is needed to show how we should modify our activities in a clear and concrete manner. The way to achieve sustainable society might be quite different in developing countries and in industrialized countries since the states of development and thus the problems they have are different. Nevertheless, the conceptual part should be in line together, since all the countries must be in the last, responsible for the future of the single planet, the earth. Recently, several movements on finding concrete and constructive ways to achieve sustainable societies have been proposed and promoted. The purpose of this symposium is to examine the cases of industrialized countries in the endeavor to establish sustainable societies. Through the presentations and discussions on prominent ideas and best practices, it is desirable to seek for the plans for future collaboration worldwide in order to have a clear picture on a sustainable human activity in the industrialized society. [UNU website].

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