NAGOYA: SUSTAINABILITY is the buzzword in all of sport. It has become part of every major event, with phrases like net zero a crucial part of the bidding process going forward.
What’s the connection between this, Kiso Village in Nagano and these Games? Well, here is the story.
There is a very interesting board at the main media centre (MMC) at the Asian Games in Nagoya. It speaks about how the organizing committee has procured their wood with conservation and sustainability in mind. Like most modern Games, this Asian Games too is targeting carbon neutrality amid growing concerns of global warming and ecological degradation.
The organizing committee entered into an agreement with the Nagano Prefecture, known for its monkey sauna or the Snow Monkey Park in one of the innumerable hot springs in this geologically active region. The city of Nagoya has been promoting the use of wood as part of their Sustainability Development goals through thinned timber – a process where the forests are cleared for healthy growth of trees. The organisers’ primary objective is to promote local Social Development Goals and also social good for the community.
What seems even more interesting is that the Aichi Declaration on Biodiversity Targets (2010-20) was signed here at Nagoya under the Nagoya Protocol.
The city of Nagoya signed the Nagoya City-Kiso Village Exchange Forest Development Agreement with the village in Nagano Prefecture. Hiroki Matsui from the Environmental Planning Division, Environmental Affairs Bureau, explained the nuances of the agreement quite succinctly. Under the agreement, the two municipalities work together on forest management, timber utilisation, environmental education, and related initiatives. That is how the desk and benches used in the media centre were procured from Kiso and were made using Japanese larch timber.
The village contains extensive planted forests that were established several decades ago and one of the reasons why they have thinned timber from the region was to help them regrow trees through thinning. “To ensure that these forests continue to provide their full environmental functions, it is important to maintain a continuous cycle of tree planting, forest cultivation, thinning, and timber utilisation,” he said. “Without end uses for harvested timber, this cycle cannot be sustained, making long-term forest management difficult.”
“For this reason, promoting the use of locally produced timber, including wood generated through thinning operations, helps support the continuation of sustainable forest management,” he said. The forests have multiple function that helps in water resource conservation, prevention of landslides and soil erosion, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity conservation. “This is why we consider this initiative to be a sustainable one,” said the official. Though it was not established specifically under the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, he says that proper forest management and the sustainable use of timber contribute to biodiversity conservation and are consistent with the objectives of both the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and their successor framework, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. “While this project is not a direct implementation of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, we believe it carries forward the spirit of COP10, which was held in Nagoya in 2010, and contributes to the conservation of biodiversity through sustainable forest management and timber use,” he said.