According to Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, seven projects have been selected in the first round of a government grant program promoting the “Deco-Katsu” national movement, which encourages citizens to adopt lifestyles conducive to decarbonization. The executing body, the Regional Circular and Ecological Sphere Partnership Association, ran a public solicitation from 13 March to 15 April 2026, receiving 13 applications. An external panel of expert reviewers then selected four wide-area-scale projects and three regional-scale projects.
The subsidy — spanning a FY2025 supplementary-budget allocation and regular FY2026 funding — is designed to back collaborative social-implementation efforts that structurally remove demand-side barriers to decarbonization, sustain behavioral change, and generate verifiable greenhouse gas reductions. The individual selected entities are listed in an attachment to the official announcement; inquiries are directed to the executing association rather than to the ministry itself.
A second application window is currently open and closes on 1 July 2026.
Carbon Market Context
- The Deco-Katsu project selections sit within Japan’s accelerating GX (green transformation) policy architecture. The GX Future Consortium opened membership recruitment in March 2026, signaling continued efforts to anchor cross-sector green-economy participation in institutional frameworks at the same time as demand-side behavioral programs are being scaled.
- A GX League working group on green market creation through intermediate emitters published its findings in March 2026, reflecting active policy interest in structural demand-side mechanisms — a theme directly paralleled by the Deco-Katsu program’s criterion of structurally resolving demand-side bottlenecks.
- A separate GX League working group on human-capital market creation also released outputs in March 2026, underscoring the workforce and institutional prerequisites for sustained demand-side decarbonization and providing broader context for the multi-year, social-implementation framing embedded in the Deco-Katsu selection criteria.
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