Communal Environmental Ethics" as Seen in the Introduction of a Forest Environmental Tax (around 2007)

Communal Environmental Ethics" as Seen in the Introduction of a Forest Environmental Tax (around 2007)

In the mid-2000s, local governments in Japan began to rethink the role of "community-based environmental conservation. Since the bubble era, urban development and depopulation had made it difficult to manage forests, and thinning and afforestation had been neglected in a rapidly increasing number of areas. Against this backdrop, Ishikawa Prefecture introduced a "forest environment tax" based on the idea that residents would restore and maintain local forests at their own expense.

Under this system, individuals and companies are taxed a certain amount, which is used to finance thinning, afforestation, and forest road maintenance. In the Kaga and Noto regions, the amount of thinning was increased to about four times that of previous years, and a regional plan was promoted with the objectives of forest regeneration, disaster prevention, and water source conservation. The background to the plan was criticism that the national forestry plan, which was led by the national government, did not adequately address the actual conditions of each region, and the efforts of Ishikawa Prefecture were seen as a model to counter this criticism.

The core ideology of this policy is the "community ethic of protecting nature as a public good. In other words, forests are not considered "assets of the state," but rather "common capital of the community. This system for local residents to protect the environment with their own hands can be seen as the germ of a new type of self-governance in contrast to the centralized nature administration that has existed since the Meiji Era.

The forest environment tax later spread to other prefectures, eventually leading to a nationwide "forest environment concession tax" system. Ishikawa Prefecture's experiment marked a turning point for local governments to take the initiative in environmental policy, and symbolized the rebirth of the Japanese public philosophy of "fusion of the environment and autonomy.