The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) have agreed to continue fortifying ties to help address “increasingly complicated” challenges in both local and international scientific landscape.

The commitment was made during the 11th anniversary of the DOST-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development on Tuesday, June 29.

In his message, JST Director for International Affairs Osamu Kobayashi said international cooperation must be forged, recognizing that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19)  will not be the last disaster of a global scale.

Kobayashi joined other leading researchers, scientists, engineers (RSEs) in sharing their experiences, insights, opportunities, and importance of human resource development to foster science and technology (S &T) innovations towards sustainable recovery during the PCIEERD-initiated webinar with the theme, “From Labs to Lives: Building R & D Capacities and Opportunities for Sustainable Recovery”.

“We should immediately react and take effective actions among like minded partners like JST and the DOST,” he said.

He cited that for partnership to grow, there should be trust among the involved parties, which can only be gained step by step through honest behavior.

"We need to work together to tackle our more complicated common challenges. We need to share our knowledge and learn best practices from each other. To do that, international cooperation is a must. So you have to have international perspectives,” Kobayashi said.

"To work together, we need to build a good partnership. So to build a good partnership, we have to be trusted to get trust. We have to be always honest and diligent. If we are always honest and diligent, we can enhance your network, and our network to work together," he added.

DOST-PCIEERD Executive Director Dr. Enrico Paringit nodded to Kobayashi’s call, even as he pledged the agency’s commitment to forge more meaningful partnerships locally and globally to help ease the plight of Filipino people.

“As a leader and partner in enabling innovations, we will continue to build meaningful collaborations across the different sectors of society and find solutions and opportunities to improve the lives of our fellow Filipinos," he said. 

The DOST and JST collaborated in e-ASIA joint research program, which was established in 2012. 

Kobayashi cited that JST and DOST are among the founding members of the program and have greatly contributed to the initiative as one of the most positive and active participants.

Other projects cited that was done in collaboration with JST were the “Development of Extreme Weather Monitoring and Information Sharing System in the Philippines” which led to the development of Diwata-1 and the “Enhancement of Earthquake and Volcano Monitoring and Effective Utilization of Disaster Mitigation Information in the Philippines” for the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) which was used as an early alert for the evacuation in the massive Taal volcano eruption in 2020.