Greetings

As an organization representing Japan's scientific community, the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) encompasses humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and it has been conducting activities over many years seeking ways to contribute, from the perspective of sciences, to the design and implementation of mechanisms which are capable of promoting and assisting sustainable development.

It is as an integral component of these activities that the SCJ has been organizing the International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability every year ever since 2003. In organizing each year's conference, a specific focal issue was selected for scrutiny. Indeed, the past five conferences held to date focused, respectively, on Energy, Asian Megacities, Dynamism in Asia, Global Innovation Ecosystem, and International Cooperation for Development. We are happy to report that each year's conference could generate serious and interactive deliberations among specialists who were invited from Japan and overseas with fruitful outcomes of the mechanisms and policies for sustainable development. It goes without saying that the scientific communications that took place at the conference and valuable information thereby created are precious intellectual assets accumulated within the SCJ, which would prove of value in the future activities of the SCJ.

Looking back over the past conferences, and taking stocks of what we have accumulated through these collaborations, it became clear to us that time is now ripe for holding this year's sustainability conference with the focus on the concept of sustainable human well-being per se. For one thing, it is to the promotion of human well-being that sciences, natural and social alike, should eventually contribute. For the other, whatever scenario we may dare to write for sustainable development, that scenario can be implemented only through the willing collaborations among human beings. It is easier said than done, however, and the Sixth International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability should confront a formidable list of challenging problems. In the first place, the conference will have to reconsider the concept of sustainable well-being altogether, a term that has been frequently mentioned, but often left unclear and ambiguous. In the second place, we must identify various hindrances that must be overcome in order to pursue the goal of sustainable development in human well-being. In the third place, we must exert ourselves to the design and implementation of social mechanisms that can effectively assist us in coping with the task of promoting human well-being thus identified.

In addressing ourselves to these tasks, we must keep in mind two crucial factors. First, time flows in one direction only, and the past activities are almost always irrevocable. Thus, more often than not, the damage on global environment cannot be undone in the future; the mark left on the environment by human activities is a classic example of irreversibility. The lesson to be learnt is that this fact should be taken into consideration ex ante in defining the concept of sustainable human well-being. Second, there are social and natural hazards that are still beyond the reach of scientific prediction. The best we can rationally hope for is to be ready to cope effectively with the damage caused by these hard-to-predict hazards. The extent to which we are ready in this sense should also be taken into consideration in defining the concept of sustainable human well-being. Examples of such hazards abound. Massive natural disasters that shake human life to their very foundations and the dysfunctions of social and economic mechanisms, which served us well in the past but are showing now signs of fatigue and dysfunction are two salient examples.

It is our strong hope that the Sixth International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability will kick off serious scientific attempts to cope with these serious problems which are threatening the promotion of human well-being.