In this end-piece to the special issue of the Japanese Journal of Environmental Education: Environmental Education in Asia, we review, compare and synthesize the discussions provided in this issue to reach our aim of going beyond merely describing environmental education (EE) in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, and seek further questions and common issues relevant to the region and possibly the global community. From the first three articles, which overviewed formal EE in each country, three issues emerged for further study: institutionalizing EE in schools, the roles of EE in improving the quality of school education, and marginalization of EE in schools oriented towards college entrance. The next three articles suggested the limited impacts non-formal EE has made on society as a whole in these places and the need to investigate how governmental institutionalization affected the characteristics, contents, and qualities of non-formal EE, to avoid weakening its diversity and autonomy. The next three articles, which overviewed EE research trends, led to the questions: "How can we transform EE practices into EE research?" and "How can we enhance the field of EE as an academic discipline?" The contribution from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia discussed the importance of understanding EE in relation to biogeography, sociocultural and socioecological history, and proposed collaboration in cross-cultural EE exchanges, "posthumanist" EE development, and EE for Asian migrants in Austrasia. Finally, the last paper invited us to envision futures for EE, raising critical questions in relation to the roles of EE to "invite" people to reflect on values, controversies, and dilemmas, to critically face the "post-truth" era, and to take necessary action. Our next step is to invite more people to join our challenge in reflecting critically on our practices as EE professionals in Asia in relation to the ecological, geographical, social, political, economic, and cultural contexts and finding ways for further development and contributions to global EE collaboration.

Taking into account of the both significant growth of higher education in Asia and the infiltration of cosmopolitan viewpoints in environmental education research, our team designed and conducted pilot survey amongst EE researchers of Japan, Korea and Taiwan (n=51) concerning: self-evaluation; methodology; training; themes; education sector levels and interests in and barriers against international collaboration. This paper shares notable trends revealed through the pilot survey and discuss the significance of these in relation to our future, full-scale survey. Toward conducting a larger-scale survey, two aspects should be stressed. First, use of native language is essential to securing greater participants. This would improve the accuracy of meaning sometimes lost through translation and increase the efficiency of completion. More survey participants would enable us to conduct crossnational comparisons, which this study could not. Second, the support from the participating academic societies is crucial not only for executing a full-scale survey but also facilitating opportunities for increasing research skills and capacities international collaboration.

This special issue is the result of a 2-year collaborative project involving environmental education (EE) societies/ associations from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, North America, and Australia. The aim of the project was to create a platform to share ideas, practices, and theories of EE in the Asian region, with English as the common language. The discussion was organized around five core themes: 1) Development, current situation, and challenges of EE in formal education; 2) Development, current situation, and challenges of EE in non-formal education; 3) Research trends in EE; 4) Insights for EE in Asia from outside of Asia; 5) Review, comparison, and synthesis of findings to go beyond a presentation of EE in various countries and instead highlight the recurring transversal issues. We hope this special issue will contribute to furthering dialogue among EE scholars and practitioners in Asia, and to building bridges between EE in Asia and other regions.

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This article discusses what Japanese environmental educators can learn from"resilience theories" as reevaluating the basic values and objectives of environmental education in Japan after the big quake and the nuclear power disaster in Fukushima in 2011. The authors introduce the development of resilience study and the basic concepts of socio-ecological system theory, summarizing key studies on"resilience"which appeared in European and North American environmental education journals.The following three issues are discussed in this article. (i) Incorporating the concept of"risk"in the context of environmental education. (ii) Reevaluating ideas surrounding socio-ecological system from the historical perspectives of social system and ecological system so as to remain critical to the history of human exploitations of nature. Also, critiquing the worldview of system theory while respecting the locality of each unique community. (iii) Creating resilience learning theory in the context of Japan, as examining diverse lessons learned in the disaster stricken Tohoku areas.Environmental educators can define"resilience"as"the power of local community facing disasters." Japanese environmental educators have always highlighted the importance of the "power of local community"as a response to environmental risk, but the authors insist that it is now crucial to take problems of social exclusion into account.