At the G20 Osaka Summit, leaders sealed a landmark packaged agreement, including the Osaka Blue Ocean Vision, aiming to wipe out additional pollution by marine plastic litter to zero by 2050.. Countermeasures against Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing also featured for the first time in the Leaders’ Declaration. The Government of Japan intends to lead the way in taking such measures to resolve these problems. For example, Japan has launched the “MARINE Initiative” to advance effective actions to combat marine plastic litter at a global scale focusing on (1) Management of wastes, (2) Recovery of marine litter, (3) Innovation, and (4) Empowerment. Under this initiative, Japan will provide training for 10,000 officials engaging in waste management in developing countries by 2025. Businesses, non-governmental organizations and individuals should also contribute toward achieving the objectives from their respective perspectives and initiative.

The concept of ‘blue carbon’ was developed in 2009 to highlight the role of coastal ecosystems in the global carbon cycle and the importance of managing these threatened ecosystems more appropriately. There are six important pathways for the global application of blue carbon. As the methodological tools to adequately measure carbon’s impact on the atmosphere have become available, it is hoped that policies can be put in place around the globe to promote the use of blue carbon as massive carbon sinks.

Earth and Planetary Science, including Oceanography, is an example of a distributed model of Big Science with an extremely broad research focus. Education also covers a broad spectrum, from cultivating literacy in the understanding of the natural environment, to education in disaster prevention and mitigation, to education for leading edge research. Given the constraints in which national universities currently find themselves, the creation of a university education consortium is needed to take capacity development and research to the highest levels. Actually, in the field of Volcanology, a project to create a consortium for the field of Volcanology is already underway.