Miyazaki Climate Change Adaptation Center
The first climate change adaptation center in Kyushu

Date of interview	September 5, 2019
Established by	Environment and Forestry Division, Environment and Forestry Department, Miyazaki Prefecture
Interviewees	Tatsuro Sasaki, Senior manager, Environment and Forestry Division Fukiko Nakahira, Deputy senior manager, Environment and Forestry Division

Installing the Adaptation Center, involving many departments

What departments belong to the Miyazaki Adaptation Center and what is the size of the center?

Sasaki: The center consists of the Environment and Forestry Department, Public Health and Environmental Science Research Office, Agriculture and Fisheries Global Warming Research Center, Forestry Technology Center and departments of the prefectural government. Our adaptation center does not have regular employees but people from those organizations work for the center. According to the establishment guidelines, the manager of each organization serves as the center members. (Figure 1) However, when practical operations are discussed, staff of the departments will attend the meeting.

Nakahira: The Environment and Forestry Division of the Environment and Forestry Department serves as the secretariat and the secretariat is basically run by two members. The organizations implementing measures related to adaptation measures have joined the center. Efforts made by individual departments are compiled to present an activity report on basic environment plan at the assembly meeting. We have approached the departments reported to implementing adaptation measures in this report. Because we have approached only the departments in the report, we may have missed out some departments implementing adaptation measures. We are hoping to include such departments if any.

Sasaki: I hope that forming the center with members of departments implementing adaptation measures will help them have a sense of ownership. At present, each department provides the secretariat with information about their adaptation measures and the secretariat provides them with information obtained from the meteorological observatories and the National Institute for Environmental Studies.

Nakahira: As the term Climate Change Adaptation did not become very familiar in the prefectural government, we have approached one department to another grabbing the pamphlet made by the national government. Some people showed an interest in joining the center but often worried that they would have to do additional duties. To those worrying, we explained that they could utilize the information provided by the secretariat for their jobs. By the time the center was established, many organizations have joined. Things would not have gone so well if they had to do additional duties.

For further promotion of adaptation measures

Since the center was established, what activities have you done? Please talk about problems with the activities, if any.

Nakahira: What we do mainly are disseminate information, share information and do the secretariat operations. To disseminate information, we issue the Adaptation Center Bulletin on climate change information once a month. The bulletin contains a summary of existing data. It briefly presents the characteristics of Miyazaki’s climate, an overview of climate change, future prediction and adaptation measures taken in the prefecture. The Adaptation Center Bulletin is posted on the environmental information website The environment in Miyazaki to make it publicly available. The bulletin is also distributed to the members of the center and they use it as a guide in examining measures. Miyazaki Meteorological Office and Fukuoka Regional Headquarters, JMA have offered cooperation and they provide us with data.
The members of the center also share email newsletters of the National Institute for Environmental Studies.

Sasaki: We are hoping that continually publishing the Adaptation Center Bulletin will help the idea of climate change adaptation take root. Problem is that a budget is not allocated separately for the center. At the moment, we manage to cover business trip and other expenses with the budget for the Environment and Forestry Department.

I suppose you will be making an adaptation plan. What is the situation like?

Nakahira: Currently, adaptation measures are included in the basic environment plan. We do not make an independent adaptation plan. As plans are slated to be reviewed next fiscal year, we are planning to make improvement including the analysis of present state and the prediction of future.

What activities are you planning? Do you need assistance from the National Institute for Environmental Studies for your activities?

Nakahira: Other Local Climate Change Adaptation Centers are organizing symposiums and workshops for their citizens and conduct impact research using the public-participation project for climate change information gathering and analysis. In the future, we would like to do those activities.

Sasaki: To formulate an adaptation plan, we sometimes ask departments to provide information. It will be helpful if we have a list of data to be collected. It will also help, if we get specialist advice on adaptation plan as we are not expert.

Nakahira: It will be difficult to make a detailed plan from the beginning. About the fields we are not covering yet, however, we will add the present state analysis, future prediction and current problems.