UN Environment Programme has recognized Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his bold environmental leadership on the global stage. Under Modi’s leadership, India pledged to eliminate all single-use plastics in the country by 2022. Prime Minister Modi also supports and champions the International Solar Alliance, a global partnership to scale up solar energy.
Zhejiang province derives its name from the Zhe River, meaning “crooked” or “bent” river. The rivers of Zhejiang Province have long been vital for communities, flowing through ancient towns, among traditional white-walled and black-roofed houses, feeding fertile rice fields. Yet Zhejiang is also one of the richest and most developed provinces in China, and rapid development turned waters black. Action was taken through a range of initiatives – including the nomination of river chiefs to take charge of the waters – to revive the environment across the province.
José Sarukhán Kermez has spent a lifetime not just leading students, fellow researchers and politicians to a greater understanding of biological diversity and its value – he has pioneered ways to translate that insight into action.
Sarukhán, 76, persuaded the Mexican government to establish a permanent top-level commission on biodiversity. The commission has bridged the traditional barriers between academic disciplines, government departments and social interest groups.
That was back in 1992, when the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio was crystallizing concern that our global development track was unsustainable. Today, the approach developed by Sarukhán is essential for the world to correct its course.
As a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), one of Mexico’s best, Sarukhán rose to become Director of the Institute of Biology in 1979 and later served as its Coordinator of Scientific Research. He was rector of the university from 1989 until 1997, and remains one of Mexico’s most renowned scientists.
His academic work in areas including ecology, biodiversity and Darwinism has won numerous awards, and he has published more than 190 scientific works as well as several books on subjects including natural capital and climate change.
But his most enduring innovation was his call in 1991 for the establishment of the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, better known as CONABIO. Sarukhán was named as its first national coordinator, a position he still holds.
The commission pools knowledge from across Mexico’s institutions and society to build a fuller understanding of the diversity of life and its immense value to humankind. Crucially, it ensures that the protection of biodiversity is considered at all levels of government policy and practice.
With strong political support – the Mexican president is also president of CONABIO – and an array of national and international donors, CONABIO produces and collates biodiversity data and assessments across Mexico's varied ecosystems and makes them available to policy-makers and the public.
It also administers or guides a range of biological conservation and sustainability projects in Mexico and the region, and cooperates on biodiversity protection at the international level, including through the Convention on Biological Diversity established at the Earth Summit.
Sarukhán has received considerable recognition within Mexico and internationally, including honorary doctorates from 10 national and foreign universities.
Masen, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy, spearheads the first large-scale capture of solar energy in the Middle East and North Africa, a bold initiative to make solar power affordable and reduce the country’s dependence on high-carbon imports.
The first phase of the Moroccan Solar Plan NOOR, the NOOR Ouarzazate I, a 160 MW concentrated solar power plant, came online early this year. When complete, it will be one of the biggest facilities of its kind in the world. It will reduce the country’s fossil fuel dependence by about 2.5 million tons of oil a year, and could eventually export renewable energy to neighbouring countries.
Masen was created in 2010 to coordinate the solar development strategy of the country’s renewable energy plan, alongside the National Office of Electricity and Potable Water.
The Kingdom of Morocco has traditionally been the largest importer of fossil fuels in the region - depending on foreign sources for over 97 per cent of its energy - and Masen is instrumental in helping to turn that around.
Masen leads projects aimed at creating an additional 3,000 MW of clean electricity generation capacity by 2020, and a further 6,000 MW thereafter. The overarching national goal is to secure 52 per cent of the country’s energy mix from renewable sources by 2030.
The first NOOR project is under construction in one of Morocco’s most disadvantaged regions, creating thousands of jobs and providing training and community development programmes for the region’s inhabitants, as well as indirect employment and other benefits.
Masen aims to share its best practices in order to boost the development of renewable energy in countries that have the potential, but not yet the ability, to harness the power of the sun.
Afroz Shah, a young Indian lawyer from Mumbai, is synonymous with the world’s largest beach clean-up project.
In October 2015, Shah and his neighbor Harbansh Mathur, an 84-year-old who has since passed away, were frustrated with the piles of decomposing waste that had washed up and completely overwhelmed the city’s Versova beach. Determined to do something about it, the pair started cleaning up the beach themselves, one piece of rubbish at a time.
Every weekend since, Shah has inspired volunteers to join him – from slum-dwellers to Bollywood stars, from schoolchildren to politicians. They have been turning up at Versova for what Shah calls "a date with the ocean", but what in reality means labouring shin-deep in rotting garbage under the scorching Indian sun.
So far, the volunteers have collected over 4,000 tons of trash from the 2.5 kilometre beach.
Shah, who rallied residents and fisherfolk by knocking on doors and explaining the damage marine litter causes, now plans to expand his group’s operation to prevent litter from washing down the local creek and onto the beach. He also wants to clean-up the coastline’s rubbish-choked mangrove forests, which act as a natural defense against storm surges, and to inspire similar groups across India and beyond to launch their own clean-up movements.
Shah is deservedly proud of the Versova residents' accomplishments. Not only has the movement brought marine little to the attention of decision-makers, it is also starting to win back the beach, with decreasing amounts of new litter appearing each month.
He vows to continue his beach clean-up crusade until people and their governments around the world change their approach to producing, using and discarding plastic and other products that wash up onto beaches all over the world.
Leyla Acaroglu instigates positive environmental and social change through innovation. A New York-based Australian designer, social scientist, and sustainability expert, she is internationally recognized as a leader in the use of disruptive design across sustainability and educational initiatives. Her mainstage TED Talk has collected over one million views, making it one of the most watched TED Talks on sustainability.
In 2014, Acaroglu completed her PhD in change-centric disruptive design and started developing the Disruptive Design Method, which is the backbone of her unique approach to design-led social change. She has won a host of awards for her work, was named one of Melbourne’s 100 Most Influential People and has been forging positive change through creative practice in multiple ways for over a decade. Her systems-based thinking coupled with her highly-skilled communication techniques has featured in several publications, including the New York Times.
Acaroglu is the founder of two design agencies, Disrupt Design in New York and Melbourne-based Eco Innovators, and a rebellious experimental knowledge lab, the UnSchool, which sets out to disrupt the usual ways that knowledge is gained and shared. It runs innovative pop-up programs around the world and has won a CORE77 Design Education Initiative Award.
As a designer, her works such as Design Play Cards, Game Changer Game, Secret Life of Things, Designercise, and the AIGA Gender Equity Toolkit, are at the forefront of activated experience design. She has authored several handbooks for change makers and continues to agitate for new ways of solving complex social problems through beautifully designed interventions.
Often referred to as ‘The Doctor of Change’, Acaroglu’s creative work is highly acclaimed, featuring in a permanent exhibition in the Leonardo da Vinci museum in Milan and earning commissions from the National Gallery of Victoria.
Paul Kagame is the current President of Rwanda having taken office in 2000.
President Kagame has prioritised national development, launching a programme to develop Rwanda as a middle income country by 2020. As of 2014, the country is developing strongly on key indicators, including health care and education: Rwanda’s maternal mortality rate dropped 55% between 2000-2010; secondary school enrolment more than doubled from 2006-2012. Annual growth between 2000 and 2014 averaged 8% per year and one million Rwandans have been lifted out of poverty.
Rwanda's economy and its people depend heavily on natural resources: land, forests, waters and wildlife, as they provide the basis for farming, fishing, household energy and tourism. At the same time, these resources are under increasing pressure from a growing population, unsustainable use, soil erosion, deforestation and climate change.
Yet Kagame has been at the forefront of forward-thinking environmental initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change. As a result, Rwanda has become an inspirational model of how to integrate economic development with environmental sustainability, how to reduce poverty through reducing vulnerability, and how to make the environment everyone's business.
Such initiatives include Rwanda’s commitment to combatting illegal forestry; restoring vital wetlands; protecting the habitat of endangered Gorillas; becoming one of the first countries in the world to ban the use of plastic bags.
In October 2016, Rwanda hosted the Montreal Protocol meeting that passed the Kigali Amendment, which could cut up to 0.5 degrees Celsius from global warming by the end of this century. As president of the 28th Meeting of the Parties, Rwanda was instrumental in bringing together the 197 countries to sign what is hailed as the single largest contribution the world has made towards keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
By working closely with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda in a shared commitment to ecosystem restoration, Rwanda has helped to restore the critically endangered population of one of the world's rarest species of gorilla in the Virunga National Park.
Before her murder, Berta Cáceres threw her life into a tireless grassroots struggle for the rights of marginalized and poverty-stricken indigenous peoples in her native Honduras.
Her death in early 2016, aged 44, sparked an international outcry at the unacceptable levels of violence and intimidation facing environmental activists in many countries around the world.
At just 20, Cáceres had co-founded the Civic Council of Popular Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an organization that advocates for the territorial rights of indigenous people in the Central American country.
She lent her considerable campaigning and networking skills to many social and environmental causes in her country, which suffers from some of the highest rates in the region of both poverty and violent crime.
Her defining struggle was against the $50 million Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, which she said was being built without proper consultation with her indigenous Lenca community. The protests culminated in a 2013 blockade that halted construction work. International investors have since withdrawn from the project.
Community members worried that the dam would harm their livelihoods and deprive them of food, medicines and access to the river, which some of them consider sacred.
Cáceres, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize last year, had reported an increasing number of death threats before assailants broke into her home in the city of La Esperanza on 3 March and shot her to death.
According to Global Witness, 185 people across 16 countries were killed defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries in 2015 – the highest annual toll on record. Honduras – with at least 109 deaths between 2010 and 2015 – was the deadliest country of all.
For championing equitable and sustainable business practices for a better world
Under Paul Polman’s leadership, Unilever has developed an ambitious vision to fully decouple its growth from environmental degradation and increase its positive social impact through the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan—entirely consistent with his personal philosophy detailing the need for sustainable business models in a world of decreasing resources.
Not only does Mr. Polman set the example for other businesses, but his chairmanship of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development further takes the message across the private sector—as do his roles in the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum, the B Team, and the Board of the UN Global Compact and the Consumer Goods Forum, where he co-chairs the Sustainability Committee.
Mr. Polman has been closely involved in global discussions on action to tackle climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. He served on the International Council of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, whose flagship report ‘New Climate Economy’ demonstrates that lasting economic growth can be achieved while reducing climate change risks. At the invitation of the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Polman also served on the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
In recognition of his contribution to responsible business, Mr. Polman has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Atlantic Council Award for Distinguished Business Leadership (2012), WWF's Duke of Edinburgh Gold Conservation Medal (2013), the Centre for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Ideas in Action Award (2013), the Rainforest Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), the UN Foundation’s Champion for Global Change Award (2014) and the Oslo Business for Peace Award (2015).
In a year when the world aims to finalize the Sustainable Development Goals and sign a new agreement on climate change, such leadership sends a vital and timely message that sustainability and profit can, and indeed should, go hand-in-hand in any forward-thinking business that wishes to thrive in the years to come.
For outstanding leadership on the frontline of climate change
HE Sheikh Hasina became Prime Minister of Bangladesh for the second time in 2009, following a period in office between 1996 and 2001, and immediately set about tackling the issue of climate change.
With a population of 140 million, Bangladesh is one of the world’s most populated countries. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Cyclones, floods and droughts have long been part of the country's history but they have intensified in recent years. Her vision is to turn Bangladesh into a middle-income country by 2021 and a developed one by 2041 through implementing environmentally aware policies.
The Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan of 2009 made Bangladesh the first developing country to frame such a coordinated action plan. Bangladesh is also the first country to set up its own Climate Change Trust Fund supported by nearly US$300 million of domestic resources from 2009-2012.
Her government earmarks 6-7 per cent of its annual budget on climate change adaptation.
In addition, the Bangladesh Constitution was amended in 2011 to include protection of the environment and safeguarding natural resources for current and future generations. Prioritized in the constitution along with wetlands and wildlife, the forestry policies initiative by Prime Minister Hasina has provided a natural barrier from some extreme weather events and the country’s forests cover has increased by almost 10 per cent.
Notable awards she received include UNESCO’s Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize 1998; Pearl S Buck Award 1999; FAO’s CERES Medal; Indira Gandhi Peace Award 2009; and Visionary Award by the Global South-South Development Expo-2014.
Sheikh Hasina—who overcame huge adversity when her father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (the country’s first president), her mother and three brothers were assassinated in 1975— sets the example for other leaders, proving that investing in the environment can achieve social and economic development. As we embark on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, such examples are to be cherished.
