OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Fujitsu Research Institute have today announced development of the first assessment tool from an ICT company that visualizes a community's characteristics from multiple perspectives, including the environment and economy.

Existing urban assessment tools can quantify environmental performance, infrastructure functions, and other factors. However, future assessments will need to be more comprehensive, especially for ensuring the sustainability of a community, and will need to take into account a region's particular attributes, including topography, population, and industrial areas.

Utilizing more than 1,200 categories of public data from government statistics and other sources, this project selected 50 items for evaluation related to the regional revitalization needed to create sustainable societies. These were chosen in accordance with quality of life and stability, safety and security, prosperity, and other factors for three regional revitalization policies, namely, the new benchmarks associated with the environment, economy and society.

Based on these policies, the newly developed tool visualized the strengths and challenges of local communities by performing comparative assessments of local governments that share similar characteristics in terms of population, industrial structure, and other representative regional attributes.

Fujitsu Laboratories and Fujitsu Research Institute conducted field trials of the tool in cooperation with the town of Shichikashuku in Miyagi Prefecture. Based on the results, Fujitsu Research Institute proposed to Shichikashuku that a "forest and water experience project" and a "forestry, biomass, and solar power project" be taken as measures for a regional revitalization program.

Details of this technology are to be announced by Fujitsu Laboratories at the 9th Meeting of the Institute of Life Cycle Assessment, Japan, running March 4 - 6 at the Toyosu Campus of the Shibaura Institute of Technology.