Three individuals have each been awarded $100,000 in recognition of their efforts to prevent species loss
Shanta Barley guardian.co.uk 21 Sep 10;
A $300,000 (£193,000) international biodiversity prize has been awarded today to three individuals in recognition of their efforts to prevent species loss. The winners of the Midori prize, who each receive $100,000, are John Lemire, a biologist-turned-filmmaker, Gretchen Daily of the Centre for Conservation Biology at Stanford University and Emil Salim, a professor of economics at Indonesia University in Jakarta.
"There is still $500,000 left but ÆON [which sponsors the prize] has not yet decided on how to distribute it," said Noriko Moriwake, an associate programme officer at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). According to Neil Pratt, senior environmental affairs officer at the CBD, the money is likely to go to a single individual.
One of the winners is Gretchen Daily, who founded the Natural Capital project – a collaboration between Stanford University, the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy – in 2006. It aims to quantify the financial value of ecosystems and encourage businesses to take sustainability into account when making decisions.
Much of Daily's research seeks to get businesses thinking about the environment. In 2004, she published a paper showing that coffee plants located near forests in Costa Rica are more productive than other plants because they are pollinated by bees living in the forest. The bees boost the yearly income of the average farm by $60,000, she estimated.
By chance, Daily also found out today that she is one of 10 winners of the 2010 Heinz award. She won the award "for her innovative work to place a value on the services provided by natural ecosystems … which has resulted in increasing momentum towards the conservation of the environment," the Heinz Family Foundation said in a statement .
Another winner of the Midori prize is John Lemire, who trained as a biologist but has spent the past decade making films that raise awareness about conservation. In Whale Mission: Keepers of Memory, Lemire filmed the North Atlantic right whale off the coast of Greenland.
The third winner of the Midori Prize is Emil Salim, an economist who served as minister of state for population and the environment for the Indonesian government between 1983 and 1993. Since 2007, he has advised President Yudhoyono on environmental issues.
The announcement of the three winners was made today at a meeting of the United Nations general assembly in New York. The award was sponsored by Japan's largest retailer, ÆON, which owns 4000 stores globally and partly controls the UK-based clothing chain Laura Ashley. Candidates for the prize were nominated between April and June.
The prize was judged by a panel that includes Takuya Okada, the chairman of ÆON's environment foundation, Ahmed Djoghlaf, the executive secretary of the Convention on Biodiversity and Konrad Osterwalder, the under-secretary general of the United Nations.
ÆON environment foundation will present the awards next month at the Conference of the Parties in Nagoya, Japan. Since the foundation was set up in 1990, it has planted 9.2 million trees around the world, including one million around the Great Wall of China.
