Sperling featured on Japanese television program for Blue Planet Prize
ITS-Davis Director Dan Sperling is highlighted on a Japanese television program titled, “Our Blue Planet: Reaching Beyond Imagination,” which features him as a recipient of the 2013 Blue Planet Prize.
The program, which aired on Jan. 10 on NHK World TV in Japan, shows footage from the Oct. 2013 Blue Planet Prize award ceremony at the United Nations University in Tokyo, where Sperling highlighted in his acceptance speech the steps society needs to take to reach a sustainable transportation future.
“We need to reverse trends and patterns of the past one hundred years,” said Sperling. “It’s not easy, but with great effort, we can recover our healthy blue planet.”
The program proceeds to follow Sperling and the other award recipient, Taroh Matsuno of Japan, in their everyday work, and reveals how the two award winners and their research earned them this prestigious title in what is commonly known as the Nobel Prize for the environmental sciences.
In an interview appearing in the latter half of the program, Sperling shares how he was first inspired to study transportation systems as a young man and explains how he was able to push for new innovations in policy and technology through the institute he created here, ITS-Davis. Sperling concludes the program with a firm goal to “bring science and policy together in a better and more effective way” for the future in order to better understand and address our planet’s climate change.
View the complete TV program here.
Read more about the Blue Planet Prize and Oct. 2013 awards ceremony here.
Photo: Asahi Glass Foundation Chairman Tetsuji Tanaka presented the Blue Planet Prize to Dan Sperling, director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. Oct. 30, 2013. Photo by Takao Tsushima — Asahi Glass Foundation
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