Global COE Program - Kyoto University - In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa

The “Second Paradigm Seminar” is a crossroads of each research initiatives that was newly established in 2010 to discuss the development of the Sustainable Humanosphere Index. Initially, research activities on the development of this index were conducted under the umbrella of Research Initiative 1, “Long-term Dynamics of Environment, Technologies, and Institutions.” However, the necessity for cross-project discussion was widely recognized by program members, because the development of this index had become one of the pillars of the final achievement of the project. In addition to the web-based discussion, a regular seminar is held on fourth Monday, from 4PM at “Chu-kaigishitsu”, Inamori memorial building.

The development of the Sustainable Humanosphere Index began with one question: What kind of modification can be applied to the Human Development Index (HDI)? The HDI was developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to implement Human Development, which was presented as a counterbalance to the doctrine of economical development, on the basis of Amartya Sen’s capability theory. In the first Human Development Report, which was published in 1990, Human Development was defined as “the process of enlarging people’s choices.” Three key indicators in the HDI were presented in the report: longevity (expressed by life expectancy at birth), knowledge (adult literacy and enrolment of education), and resources needed for a decent living (measured by the purchasing-power-adjusted real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita). By discussing the HDI in a narrow sense, some questions were raised. Do the first two measures applied in the HDI take the qualitative aspect of life or education into consideration? Does the last one measure account for the perspective of sustainable development proposed in “Our Common Future”?

For the analytical framework of the Sustainable Humanosphere Index, we applied a common world view in our project: Geosphere, Biosphere, and Humanosphere. We believe that a Sustainable Humanosphere will be realized by employing the original logic of three spheres: the Geosphere (Circulation and Fluctuation), the Biosphere (Selection and Adaptation), and the Humanosphere (Selves and Sympathy). We are confident that the process of developing index will evolve into a new paradigm for our livelihood.