Please tell us about Toda City’s unique local features and characteristics, what led to the establishment of the City’s Climate Change Adaptation Center, and what its organizational structure is like.

Situated in the southern part of Saitama Prefecture and bordering Tokyo with the Arakawa River in between, Toda City is a flourishing community with abundant aquatic and plant resources, with lush green areas scattered across the municipality, along with the Toda Boat Course and large public parks and rest areas where families can play. In terms of what led to the establishment of the Toda City Climate Change Adaptation Center, we started contemplating it as the Climate Change Adaptation Act had passed, requiring each municipality to set up an organization that could function as its local climate change adaptation center. Then we instituted the Center officially to further facilitate our climate change adaptation measures for preventing and mitigating the harmful effects of climate change, which had been manifesting more egregiously in recent years, in the form of natural disasters and health issues. The Center was established as a jointly operated entity with Saitama Prefecture, which already had the prefectural Climate Change Adaptation Center set up. The Toda City Climate Change Adaptation Center is headed by the manager of the municipality’s environmental and economic department and run by a staff of three employees that are also in charge of environmental policy at the municipality’s environmental section.

Please tell us about the current activities of Toda City’s Local Climate Change Adaptation Center as well as its future plans.

Toda City has created a webpage dedicated to the Climate Change Adaptation Center within the municipality’s website, where information is published on the climate change taking place in Saitama Prefecture and Toda City’s activities to address it.
In terms of the municipality’s own unique measures, we have been disclosing information to the public on the number of reported hyperthermia cases that required emergency medical services, indicating emerging trends and raising caution to prevent the condition.
As for our future plans, Toda City will be holding events related to environmental issues to disseminate information on climate change.
In addition, as the municipality has been selected as a participant in the Ministry of the Environment’s subscription-based air-conditioning promotion model initiative for this fiscal year, we are considering how the knowledge gleaned from it for preventing hyperthermia could be utilized effectively.

Please tell us about any unique approach that your Local Climate Change Adaptation Center is taking to effectively coordinate with other departments of the Toda City government and to facilitate adaptation by the City and businesses, as well as any issues, etc. you are experiencing.

Although it has already been over a year since the Center was established, we are still in the process of determining what measures we could facilitate, which makes it difficult for us to make specific requests for cooperation with other sections of the municipal government, so this issue must be resolved for efficient coordination internally.
As for the support we provide to businesses, we have not yet determined what their needs are, so we must improve this situation in order to identify what the optimal measures might be.

Please tell us what motivates you to do your current work and also your outlook on the future.

As all this is an unprecedented undertaking for us, we are constantly experiencing a sense of doubt as to what the right solutions might be in our work, but conversely it just might be the ideal situation for trying out new ideas, so that might be a positive aspect of our job. Indeed, since the launch of our Local Climate Change Adaptation Center’s webpage, we have been striving to make available to the public the kinds of information that were not actively disclosed by our section before, such as statistical data of hyperthermia cases that required ambulance services in the past and the trends discerned from the data, how the temperature and the frequency of heavy precipitation have been on the rise in Saitama Prefecture, etc.
In terms of future outlook, our goal is to implement actions and disseminate information that are congruous with the unique features and characteristics of Toda City.