Greetings from the Director

Director of Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral Society
Chairman of Advanced Collaborative Research Organization for Smart Society (ACROSS)
Program Coordinator of Waseda Carbon Net Zero Challenge
Program Coordinator of “Power Energy Professionals” (PEP) Program under the WISE Program (MEXT)
HAYASHI Yasuhiro

In response to increasing global attention to SDGs and carbon neutrality, Waseda University declared the “WASEDA Carbon Net Zero Challenge” on November 1, 2021. The challenge aims to improve people’s well-being in a carbon-neutral society by achieving three goals simultaneously: promoting cutting-edge research, facilitating doctoral students’ training, and responding to society’s needs. To drive the achievement of the goals, the university established a new center called the Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral Society (WCANS).

With our university’s culture of promoting free expression in academia, WCANS will play a hub-like role in linking across a wide range of different disciplines including humanities, social sciences, and engineering at Waseda University and in promoting collaborations with industries, governments, and other universities in the world.

Our challenge is rooted in the long-term university plan called “Waseda Vision 150” set toward the university’s 150th anniversary in 2032. Inheriting the vision, WCANS will mobilize and expand the university’s collective knowledge to contribute to the realization of a carbon neutral society by 2050.

Associate Director of Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral Society
Faculty of Science and Engineering, School of Advanced Science and Engineering
Professor TAKEYAMA, Haruko

Initiatives geared toward the achievement of a carbon neutral society proceed with the involvement of governments, industry, academia, and even private citizens. As we confront the extreme weather events that we have been facing in recent years, we become increasingly aware of the immense impact that the degradation of the global environment has on the future survival of the human species. The Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral Society brings together diverse research domains to leverage the latest in cutting edge research results to tackle these challenges, thereby serving as a place to provide revolutionary solutions. As Associate Director of the Center, my particular focus is on research based in biotechnology, and I intend to strengthen domains that can contribute to the conservation of the global environment and to sustainable development by promoting solutions to environmental issues and the bioeconomy at the same time. Meanwhile, I intend to deepen the Center’s collaboration with industry and local society in order to apply practical solutions to society at large.

We all are now facing a number of global challenges including global warming, energy, food, population, poverty, inequality, and infectious diseases. Because such problems are interconnected socially and technologically, we need the combination of social and technological innovation to confront the global challenges. Our center aims to play a key role in realizing such innovation under the keyword of carbon neutrality by linking a wide range of different disciplines from engineering to humanities at Waseda University and by bridging between the university, industry and government in Japan and abroad.

Associate Director of Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral Society
Faculty of Political Science and Economics
Professor SHIMOKAWA Satoru

Page Top 

Waseda Center for a Carbon Neutral SocietyWaseda University

About center

Greetings from the Director

Greeting from the Director

Greetings from the Associate Directors