Improving GHG inventories by regional information exchange: a report from Asia

BACKGROUND: The Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are required to develop and report a national inventory of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol. In the Asia region, "Workshops on Greenhouse Gas Inventories in Asia (WGIA)" have been organised annually since 2003 under the support of the government of Japan. WGIAs promote information exchange in the region to support countries' efforts to improve the quality of greenhouse gas inventories. This paper reports the major outcomes of the WGIAs and discusses the key aspects of information exchange in the region for the improvement of inventories. RESULTS: The major outcomes of WGIAs intended to help countries improve GHG inventories, can be summarised as follows: (1) identification of common issues and possible solutions by sector, (2) reporting country inventory practices, and (3) verification of the UNFCCC reporting requirements. CONCLUSION: The workshops provided the opportunity for countries to share common issues and constraints pertinent to GHG inventories and to exchange information regarding possible solutions for those issues based on their own experience. The relevance of information exchange is determined due to emission sources, emitting mechanisms from sources, and technologies used. Information exchange about emission sources that are unique to Asia, like those of the agriculture sector, contributes significantly to the accumulation of knowledge at the regional and global levels. Enabling countries to verify their national circumstances with the reporting requirements under UNFCCC is also an essential part of the WGIA information exchange activities

THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION FOR THE STATE UKRAINIAN THEATER (1930): Application proposals from Japan

Even although the International Competition for the State Ukrainian Theater (1930) did not result in any construction, it was a major landmark of Modernism in Ukrainian architecture. The competition received 144 entries from Soviet Union states and other countries, including four individual and one team proposals from Japan. Of these, Renshichiro Kawakita, a 29-year-old architect from Japan, was awarded the fourth prize and ranked higher than world-famous architects and designers like Walter Gropius, Norman Bel Geddes, and Hans Poelzig. This article deals with the modernist architectural scene in Japan around 1930 by introducing Japanese modernist architects’ applications to the competition. The structure of this paper is as follows: The introduction presents the four groups of applicants from Japan, and highlights the tense shipping deadline faced by Kawakita based on a retrospective by his collaborator. The main part points out that the proposal from Japan understood the organizer’s purpose to seek new ideas for theaters as cultural facilities for the proletariat via this competition, and designed it in line with that purpose. In this regard, Kawakita’s effective presentation in the drawings led to his prize. It also examines Kawakita’s architectural philosophy based on his comments after winning the prize. Kawakita praised functionalism and anti-aesthetics and believed that new architects should be engineers (rather than artists) with “inventor” nuances. This idea resonates with the international avant-garde ideas of the time in modernist architecture

THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION FOR THE STATE UKRAINIAN THEATER (1930)

Even although the International Competition for the State Ukrainian Theater (1930) did not result in any construction, it was a major landmark of Modernism in Ukrainian architecture. The competition received 144 entries from Soviet Union states and other countries, including four individual and one team proposals from Japan. Of these, Renshichiro Kawakita, a 29-year-old architect from Japan, was awarded the fourth prize and ranked higher than world-famous architects and designers like Walter Gropius, Norman Bel Geddes, and Hans Poelzig. This article deals with the modernist architectural scene in Japan around 1930 by introducing Japanese modernist architects’ applications to the competition. The structure of this paper is as follows: The introduction presents the four groups of applicants from Japan, and highlights the tense shipping deadline faced by Kawakita based on a retrospective by his collaborator. The main part points out that the proposal from Japan understood the organizer’s purpose to seek new ideas for theaters as cultural facilities for the proletariat via this competition, and designed it in line with that purpose. In this regard, Kawakita’s effective presentation in the drawings led to his prize. It also examines Kawakita’s architectural philosophy based on his comments after winning the prize. Kawakita praised functionalism and anti-aesthetics and believed that new architects should be engineers (rather than artists) with “inventor” nuances. This idea resonates with the international avant-garde ideas of the time in modernist architecture