President Sachihiko Harashina's Biography

He has been working in the field of environmental planning and policy making. After receiving Ph.D. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1975, he started his research activities at his school, then at the National Institute for Environmental Studies. He was visiting Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981-1982. He moved back to Tokyo Tech in 1983 as Associated Professor, and became Professor in 1995, and then worked as Dean of the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering until his retirement. He retired from Tokyo Tech in March and moved to Chiba University of Commerce in April 2012. He had been also Guest Professor at the Open University of Japan for giving TV courses on Environmental Impact Assessment, 1993-2009.

His field in environmental planning is public participation, consensus building and EIA. He has been advising national and local governments in this field. One of his contributions out of school is facilitating consensus building processes in environmental topics. Those include environmental dispute resolution, environmental planning and making EIA guidelines of various organizations.

The activities in the international area are advising environmental and social consideration systems. He helped to create the guideline of EIA for the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), 2001-2002, to revise the EIA guideline of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 2002-2004, and to create the guideline of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), 2006-2008. For all of these, he worked as the chairpersons. He has been appointed as the Examiners Panel for JICA. As the major body for ODA, New JICA was established in October 2008 with merging the Yen Loan division of JBIC. For new JICA, he has been again chairing the committee for revising the guideline 2008-2010. He received the JICA Presidential Award for this contribution in 2011.

Major activities in academic societies of environmental studies and planning: He has been President of the Japan Association for Planning Administration, 2008-2011. In the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), he had been on the Board, 2000-2003, and was on the presidential position, 2007-2010 (President, 2008-2009). He won the Rose-Hulman Award, the premier award of IAIA, in 2013 for the first time from Asia in its 29 years history. With his colleagues, he held the annual conference of IAIA in Japan for the first time, in Nagoya 2016. He created IAIA Japan in 1997, whose members became the core of the Japan Society for Impact Assessment created in 2002. Then he established the Japan Branch of IAIA in 2015 as the representative.

He was on the Editorial Board of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal. He had been also on the International Advisory Board of Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 1985-2008.