The challenges we face today are growing conspicuously broad in scale and complex in nature. Human Survivability Studies is a new transdisciplinary field born from the growing awareness of the urgent need to tackle the large-scale environmental and social issues at crisis point in the world today.

Based at Kyoto University, the recently established Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies in Human Survivability is seeking to develop leaders able to challenge global problems on a number of fronts. Each of the twenty chapters in this volume, written by academics from the Graduate School, looks at critical issues facing humanity from a different perspective, discussing new ideas and scientific methods that will form the basis of human survivability. The aim here is to outline the framework behind the ideas, methodology, and practice of this new scientific paradigm that incorporates knowledge from both the social and natural sciences.