Environment

Japan's seafood processors are beginning to shift their business focus from catching fish from the sea to inland fish farming as new technologies and legal revisions make this kind of aquaculture more appealing.

Japan has seen a series of incidents in which people inside cars stalled by heavy snow suffered carbon monoxide poisoning.

The finals of the 7th AEON Eco-1 Grand Prix environmental competition for Japanese high school students were held at Tokyo Big Sight in the city’s Koto Ward on Dec. 8. Again, as in previous years, I was among the judges examining entries and selecting winners of the annual prizes awarded by the Chiba-based multinational’s 1% Club Foundation and the Mainichi national newspaper.

Crested ibises in Japan are facing less risk of extinction amid efforts to reintroduce the birds to the wild, leading the government to consider lowering its status on the list of threatened species, government sources said Saturday.

A decade-old community effort in Nagoya to recycle food waste from supermarkets and school lunches to make compost for vegetable farming has been awarded the Biodiversity Action Award by the Japan Committee for United Nations Decade on Biodiversity (UNDB).

One morning earlier this month, a special garbage truck arrived at the parking lot of the Kakuozan Frante supermarket in Chikusa Ward. There, scraps of Chinese cabbage, Japanese white radish and other vegetables generated by the presale cutting process were thrown in.

“Urgency” and “inclusiveness” were two keywords at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Katowice, Poland, from Dec. 2 to 15.

In casting an eye back over memorable science and environment stories from Japan in 2018, it is impossible to ignore the extreme weather that hit the country.

Japan has decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission in a bid to resume commercial whaling for the first time in 30 years, government sources said Thursday.

Supplies of uranium, used to fire nuclear power plants, are becoming increasingly plentiful globally, threatening to make redundant Japan's long-standing policy of recycling spent nuclear fuel.

Asia has been battered in 2018 by a series of extreme weather events such as floods and typhoons, and the prospects for coming decades are bleak with rising temperatures set to spur even more severe cases of inundation.