New Edition of Listings of Societal Issues 2023

The Listings of Societal Issues, published by Mitsubishi Research Institute’s (MRI) Initiative for Co-creating the Future (ICF), highlights problems with high societal impact across 6 fields and presents a total of 31 problems. Each are covered in a format beginning with a description of the societal problem followed by more specific societal issues and finally clues to solution.

MRI aims to sound a warning regarding what is happening in the world today, what the crucial problems are, and what the essence or root causes of those problems are. MRI then goes further to provide hints for how to resolve issues and create opportunities for concrete solutions. These goals are achieved through a set of approaches, including analysis of the reality and causes of the issues, identification of the importance and priority, setting tasks for resolving the problems, and offering hints that lead to specific solutions.

The 2023 listings re-examined issues in light of the major events of the recent global situation such as the covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. For example, while from the perspective of education and human capital management, the issue of the “insufficient number of working professionals receiving recurrent education” in the field of talent development has been significantly re-worked. Within the water and food sectors, in light of the debate among the international community, the issue of “double burden of malnutrition” (i.e., coexistence of undernutrition and overnutrition) has been incorporated into the problem of “persistent unhealthy diets in a prosperous society". Furthermore, the booklet has been redesigned incorporating a strong emphasis on visual representations from the perspective of science communication.

The three key points that were updated in the latest edition are as follows.

The visual abstract method has been adopted to help readers understand the social problems, societal issues, clues for solutions for each topic. Originally developed in the western academic context to visually represent abstracts of research papers, this technique illustrates the background, methodology, and outcomes in three illustrations. ICF created visual abstracts for all the 31 societal issues in this edition. This approach allows for a quick understanding of the structural aspects of the challenges; and for those interested, it also facilitates further exploration by reading the detailed content of the corresponding sections.