Green economy? from smart-city business battle view in Asia
Hisakazu Okamura
Asia University, Japan
: Expert Opin Environ Biol
Abstract
Smart-city, variety of the meaning of this word has been understood differently by many countries. I was leading the business of this smart-city in IBM Japan for decades, matter of fact we called it as smarter cities. Prior to the announcement of the smarter cities in 2008 with IBM, I established an environmental business unit in IBM Japan and collaborating the fellows in IBM all over the world. In the early stage of the city, consideration was supported by the global movement of the CO2 consideration started with COP. Especially COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the mood of global consistent agreement for the global warming correspondence became the peak in discussion. However, the result was the Paris agreement which was held in 2016, 7 years later. Besides, the IBM and the IT companies were leading smartcity business as a city innovation project supported by IT system by considering the global warming counter measurement, mainly the countries in Asia have been rushing to re-innovate super cities with the investment of China and European companies. Surely, we wanted to save this planet by considering energy efficient cities on green economy with the banner as “smart city” on but the smart city projects looking only at the economy were growing outside US and Japan. On the other hand in 2011, Japan that had been leading green economy was hit by the great earth quake had only the choice to escape the green economy due to the energy crisis. In Asia, we have many developing and emerging countries that want to be developed countries on the investment from China and Europe. Different from the fundamental country needs and green economy requirements, they are rushing to be the high energy using countries because those investors want to implement their own solutions not the fundamental requests from poverty, water security and serious disease but high-tech roads and super transportations.
Biography
Hisakazu Okamura is a Faculty of Urban Innovation, Asia University in Tokyo Japan has been leading worldwide smart-city projects in his over 32-year career in IBM Japan and in the new role of teaching smart-city and Big Data at the newly developed faculty (2016) for smart-city in Asia University in Tokyo Japan. From a 350 citizen, snowy small village project to the largest Japanese $1B 340 MHz Photovoltaic plant to a project supporting the mayor of New Orleans, the range of his work is highly diverse. His book “Smart-city” published in 2011 became the guidebook for smart-city business in Japan. In 2017, International NPO CSR day awarded him the recognition of one of the “50 most impactful smart-city leaders of the world”. His philosophy for smart-city thinking is: “Only healthy business can help people and society be sustainable.”
