NAIROBI, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Tuesday announced five winners of a prestigious award dedicated to individuals, firms, and grassroots lobbies promoting a transition to a green and resilient future.
The UNEP said the organizations and individuals who bagged the 2022 Champions of the Earth award were shortlisted for their transformative work that helped reverse the depletion of vital ecosystems.
Inger Andersen, the UNEP's Executive Director, hailed the five winners of this year's edition of the prestigious environmental award for their dedication towards regenerating ecosystems and securing a greener future for humanity.
"This year's champions demonstrate how reviving ecosystems and supporting nature's remarkable capacity for regeneration is everyone's job: governments, the private sector, scientists, communities, non-governmental organizations, and individuals," Andersen said in a statement issued in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.
Launched in 2005, the UNEP's Champions of the Earth award seeks to reward pioneers in green transformation and so far, it has recognized 111 laureates, 26 world leaders, 69 individuals, and 16 organizations, said UNEP.
This year's winners of the award were shortlisted from 2,200 nominations and were spread across diverse sectors including academia, gender rights activism, grassroots conservation, and social enterprise.
According to the UNEP, this year's Champions of the Earth award sought to shine a spotlight on pragmatic actions that are aiding efforts to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystems' degradation globally in line with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration covering 2021 to 2030.
The five winners include a Lebanese social enterprise called Arcenciel which was honored in the Inspiration and Action category for recycling more than 80 percent of the country's infectious hospital waste annually.
Other winners honored in the Inspiration and Action category includes a Cameroonian gender rights advocate, Cecile Bibiane Ndjebet, who is leading efforts to influence policy on gender parity in forest management across 20 African countries.
Constantino (Tino) Aucca Chutas, a Peruvian green campaigner was also honored in the Inspiration and Action category for pioneering a community reforestation model driven by local and indigenous communities, leading to the planting of three million trees in the Latin American Nation.
In the Science and Innovation category, a British economist, Partha Dasgupta, was honored for his scholarly work calling for a rethink of humanity's relationship with nature to halt further degradation of already fragile ecosystems.
And in the Entrepreneurial Vision category, an Indian wildlife biologist, Purnima Devi Barman was honored for leading an all-female grassroots conservation lobby dedicated to the protection of the Greater Adjutant Stork amid threats of extinction. ■
