Kimiko Hirata

To my surprise, the proposal received 34 percent support from shareholders.

Thank you.

including large institutional investors, that became quite big news across the country.

As a result of those multiple works, out of 50 proposed core projects, 17, totaling nine gigawatts, were canceled.

These cancellations prevented 50 million tons of CO2 per year and 1.7 billion tons over their lifetimes.

That's equivalent to taking more than eight million cars off the road every year for 40 years.

Of course, the success wasn't ours alone.

Many people took action, too.

But many canceled projects overlapped with regions where we worked intensively.

I can tell that our collaborative efforts worked.

Civil society in Japan is often considered small and powerless.

But even as a small group, what seems impossible is not necessarily impossible.

That's what I learned.

But this is not the end of my journey.

Stopping one third of new coal projects is just one step.

We still heavily depend on fossil fuels in Japan.

The real challenge for us now is to transform our entire economy away from fossil fuels.

That means saying no isn't enough.

We need to build positive, strong yes for systemic change.

But we still face various arguments, such as, renewable energy is expensive, it's not reliable.