Taroh Matsuno is a modest man who wants to give credit to young scientists for various achievements in his research field — climate study.

"I shouldn't be a main character. The main characters are young researchers who actually do a lot of work in various projects," Matsuno, 79, said in a recent interview at a Tokyo hotel.

Matsuno, principal scientist at the Research Institute for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC, was awarded the Blue Planet Prize, a prize given to those who contribute to solutions to environmental issues by The Asahi Glass Foundation this year.

He said he got the prize for "laying the foundations for young scientists to nurture themselves to excel in the field of climatology."

For example, he served as the chief of the Center for Climate System Research, the University of Tokyo, founded in 1991, which trained and gave necessary research facilities to climate scientists, from 1991 to 1994. The center was merged and is now a part of the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo.

Also, he served as the dean of the Department of Atmosphere and Ocean Environment at Hokkaido University for four years from 1994 when it had just been founded. He created the department from scratch, hiring professors and doing other preparatory work.

Similarly, he served as the chief of the Global Frontier Research System, created by the Agency of Science and Technology in 1997, from 1997 to 2005. The system is now called the Frontier Research Center for Global Change, under JAMSTEC.

Environmental push

He modestly said he had the privilege of taking such prestigious positions as a scientist because he was one of the most senior researchers around the late 1980s when the Japanese government, as well as the whole world, began to take tackling environmental issues seriously.

In late the 1980s, environmental scientist James Hansen said in the U.S. Congress that increasing carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming, raising a sense of crisis in the world. Matsuno played a leading role among Japanese scientists in pushing the science ministry to consider strengthening environmental research, he said.

"Since Dr. Hansen's remarks, the environment became the center of international politics and was brought up very frequently in summit meetings," he said.

Amid such a global movement, the University of Tokyo established the Center for Climate System Research in 1991, where researchers worked on estimating climate change dozens or hundreds of years in the future.