Graduate School of Environmental Studies
Dean

Founded in 2003, Graduate School of Environmental Studies (GSES) will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary. So far, we have been struggling to find answers for the following questions: What is Environmental Studies? What kind of education and research should we pursue? What can we do for a brighter future? The integration of arts and sciences has been a consistent policy of our approach to answering the questions. When someone makes an invention and tries to put it into practice in a society, the trial often fails with a single-direction approach. Specifically, a resource or energy-related issue is a problem with complicated boundary conditions that are globally connected. Finding the best answer requires wide and deep knowledge on the issues. The graduate school’s faculty members are the top leaders of various academic fields in not only engineering and natural sciences but also social sciences and the humanities. They have been leading their own fields and, at the same time, have communicated with each other to find a common horizon for Environmental Studies. Now, based on those achievements, we will take a step further toward a practical use of Environmental Studies, where we will be able to indicate a way to solve environmental issues by connecting the knowledge of those in diverse fields.

Now, many countries and regions in the world have committed to achieve carbon neutral operation by 2050. However, the path to reach this goal is still in a fog. Finding the route will be tasked to the present teenagers and those in their twenties. My desire is that the young people who are, or will be, studying in GSES will acquire skills in the specialized fields and play important parts in the community, society, and in the world. Furthermore, I hope they obtain the ability to grasp the issues from a bird’s-eye view to select a better future for themselves and for others. GSES started with a single department of Environmental Studies, which was reorganized into the two departments of Environmental Studies for Advanced Society and Frontier Sciences for Advanced Environment in 2015, and has provided unique educational curriculums. Many international programs, as well as training programs, have been offered to achieve our educational goal. I hope the students will actively utilize these chances to deepen their studies.

In these two years, we have suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic, and our university activities have been restricted. However, what we should do for the future remains unchanged. Let us step forward together.