On June 12, a kickoff symposium was held for the Nature Positive Sustainable Development Hub, an industry-government-academia project led by Tohoku University that includes NYK and 26 other companies and organizations. Kaori Nagasawa, manager of NYK’s Sustainability Initiative Team in the ESG Group, participated in a panel discussion.

The project aims to coexist in harmony with a rich natural environment by preventing damage to biodiversity. It was launched in April this year and was selected by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) as a full-fledged project for COI-NEXT, an open innovation platform for industry-academia co-creation.*

Professor Michio Kondo,** the project director, participated in the panel discussion with Nagasawa and others. The panelists discussed the importance of nature positives, issues for social implementation, and the project's role. Nagasawa advocated the importance of international rules-setting and certification schemes for social implementation and the significance of creating examples and frameworks jointly through industry, government, and academia.

The initiative to protect the marine environment is the most important theme for the NYK Group, which desires to give back to the sea. In June 2010, NYK joined the ANEMONE consortium, a large-scale environmental DNA monitoring project headed by Tohoku University. By collecting seawater samples, we have been involved in expanding the ANEMONE DB, a dedicated database that anyone can access free of charge. This project also plans to utilize data from the ANEMONE DB to develop science and technology to visualize the value of nature.

* COI-NEXT
An industry-academia-government collaboration in which universities and other organizations take the lead in formulating a vision for future society, promoting research and development to realize the vision, and aiming to form an independent industry-academia-government co-creation initiative that continually generates results.

** Professor Kondo oversees the Ecological Integration Lab in the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University, and he is the leader of the Ecological Complexity Research Unit at the World Premier International (WPI) Advanced Institute for Marine Ecosystem Change (AIMEC) Change (WPI-AIMEC), an alliance-type WPI research center initiative linking Tohoku University's basic academic and higher education functions with the marine research and computer platform functions of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).