What kinds of soil exist in which locations? A website called the Japan Soil Inventory provides answers to questions just like these. It is a digitized version of the Soil Information Web Viewer developed by the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, which covers the whole of Japan, and it provides users with an at-a-glance understanding of the distribution of soil across the country, which has 381 different types of soil when soil on non-agricultural land is also included. As soil has a major influence on agricultural crop production, understanding which soils are suitable for cultivation is absolutely crucial. Ensuring the stable availability of soil resources is an issue that should also be top of mind from the perspective of a nation’s food security.

Rice is a wetland plant. Growing rice in paddy fields can suppress growth of upland weeds and facilitates soil managements. Paddy field soil generally shows higher fertility than upland field soil, supporting stable rice yields under low fertilization conditions. A combination of several factors resulted in the development of rice cultivation in paddy fields in Japan. The high fertility of paddy fields is supported by various functions of microorganisms in the soil. They decompose organic matter in the soil and produce inorganic nutrients requisite for growth of rice plants. On the other hand, emission of methane, one of the decomposition products of organic matter, has become an environmental problem. Mitigation of methane emission is a pressing issue since the gas has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO₂.

Soils around the world each have their individual characteristics, which are influenced by such environmental factors as climate, topography, parent material, biology and time. The black soil mainly found extensively across the Eurasian Steppe and other regions with a semiarid steppe climate is soft, rich in both organic matter and mineral nutrients, and highly productive. The lack of rain in deserts means that nutrients do not get washed away, so the soil is rich in minerals. However, some land has been degraded by human activity; for example, irrigation has caused salinization in Kazakhstan, while overcultivation in Niger has been responsible for wind erosion. Scientists are engaged in ongoing efforts to understand the diversity of soils and explore measures that also take into account sociocultural characteristics.

Soil is a complex structure composed not only of minerals released by the weathering of rocks on Earth’s surface, but also of water, air, organic and inorganic matter, and microorganisms. Formed over long periods of time under the influence of climate, topography, and living organisms, among others, soil is a living system that governs ecosystems, supports biological activity, and plays an essential role in our lives as a place where food is produced. However, it has deteriorated significantly as human activity has intensified, and is also affected by climate change. People are now becoming aware of a crucial question: how can we maintain Earth’s soil?

Major floods are becoming a frequent occurrence across the globe. Even in Japan, floods and landslides occur across the country. Accurate information is essential to ensure that people take appropriate action to evacuate in an emergency. Various kinds of reliable information about disaster risk reduction can be obtained via the mass media and online, including the KIKIKURU real-time hazard map provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). You can also gain an understanding of the risks around you beforehand by viewing the hazard maps published by local governments. To ensure appropriate action, the most crucial thing is to make comprehensive use of the available information.

As a disaster-prone country, Japan has some of the world's most advanced systems for observing earthquakes, tsunami, and volcanic activity. In 2017, the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) launched a network called Monitoring of Waves on Land and Seafloor (MOWLAS), to integrate observation data from around 2,100 sites nationwide, covering land and sea, and facilitate the efficient sharing of this information with the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and other relevant organizations (Figure 1). An Earthquake Early Warning alert is transmitted immediately after an earthquake strikes and information about the seismic intensity is sent about 90 seconds later. Japan is the only country in the world with this capability.

Climate change driven by global warming is causing frequent large-scale floods, not only in Japan, but across the globe. This situation means that disaster risk reduction measures in Japan have reached a major turning point. The field is about to enter a more practical, advanced phase of efforts to respond to meteorological disasters in the form of typhoons, linear rainbands, and the localized downpours of torrential rain over a short period–known as guerrilla rainstorms. In addition to more accurate forecasting, these responses include flood control plans based on the assumption of flooding. At the same time, appropriate risk communication that conveys uncertainties is also required.

Plants cannot uproot themselves to go and find the optimal environment for their survival. The circadian clock is a crucial survival strategy enabling plants to stay alive while they respond appropriately to a changing environment. Each cell has a clock gene, and these genes are thought to be synchronized somehow. How is the circadian clock involved in the physiological phenomena of plants? And given that plants do not have a central organ equivalent to the mammalian brain, how do they synchronize their multiple clocks?

Over the course of their evolution, the ancestors of plants incorporated microbes called cyanobacteria and gained the ability to carry out photosynthesis to produce organic matter from inorganic substances. As a result, plants came to play a part in nourishing almost all living organisms. Furthermore, plants developed more sophisticated immune functions thanks to symbiosis with microorganisms called endophytes, evolving in tandem with them, leading to the acquisition of temperature resistance and other functions that minimized the adverse impacts of the external environments. The interests of plants and endophytes are similar, and one might say it was the providence of nature that resulted in their finding common ground after a long time.

Photosynthesis is the reaction in which plants use light to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic matter and emit oxygen. Thanks to photosynthesis, the organisms on Earth that require oxygen are able to survive and evolve. Accordingly, photosynthesis has been described as one of the best mechanisms to have emerged since life on our planet came into existence. The detailed mechanism had remained shrouded in mystery down through the ages. However, a fragment of that mechanism has now, at last, been revealed. Further studies on the process may lead to the realization of artificial photosynthesis, which will undoubtedly contribute substantially to the combat against global warming.