To sustain natural resources for future generations, HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal has addressed environmental issues in a holistic manner. In particular, his belief in transboundary collaboration to protect the environment merits global recognition.
HRH has initiated, founded and has been actively involved in a number of Jordanian and international environmental institutions. As President of Jordan’s Higher Council for Science and Technology (HCST), he has emphasized the need for relevant and improved environmental policies, strategies and programmes. HRH has ensured that HCST focuses on enhancing the quality of life of the inhabitants of dryland areas, empowering them to improve their standard of living using available resources without having to change their traditional way of life.
Also under his leadership, the Royal Scientific Society has been active in the field of environmental management and protection, specifically water quality management. H. R. H. has supported global partnerships aimed at ensuring sustainable energy use, such as the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, an organization which has had a measurable impact on sustainable development and which has pointed the way to clean and equitable energy production by sharing capital and know-how.
Mr. Barbosa is widely recognized as one of the earliest and most successful banking executives to integrate environmentally and socially conscious practices into his leadership.
He is based in São Paulo, Brazil, where he serves as Chief Executive Officer of Abril S.A., one of Latin America’s largest and most influential media enterprises. Presently he is a member of Ayrton Senna Institute, a non-profit organization that researches and produces knowledge to improve the quality of education, and the Endeavor Enterprise Institute, an NGO that fosters entrepreneurship in Brazil. For 8 years, Barbosa was board member of Petrobrás.
He was previously President of the Board of Directors of Banco Santander Brasil, one of the largest banks in Brazil. His vision of a transparent financial market that supports societal aspirations led him to the presidency of the Brazilian Banks’ Association (FEBRABAN). He also served for 12 years as President of Banco Real /ABN Amro in Brazil, before it was acquired by Santander.
As president of Banco Real, Mr. Barbosa introduced a transformative sustainability initiative that included social and environmental risk analysis, ethical investment funding, microcredit operations, and a diversity programme, which led the Financial Times to name the bank Sustainable Bank of the Year in 2007. Mr. Barbosa’s initiative became the object of a study at Harvard and earned Banco Real other sustainability awards from the UN, the International Chamber of Commerce and The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum.
Mr. Barbosa continues to be recognized for his efforts to integrate philanthropic and sustainable practices into business models. In 2010 he was named Leader of Social Change by the Foundation for Social Change in partnership with the UN, and in July 2011, the UN Foundation announced he had joined its Board of Directors.
“Fábio Barbosa has a proven record of bringing together leaders in the Western hemisphere, the business community and the people of Brazil to focus on global problems,” said Ted Turner, Founder and Chairman of the UN Foundation’s Board of Directors.
H. E. Mr. Cherif Rahmani’s career has been guided by a profound commitment to the protection of our planet. As a Minister, he has worked tirelessly to greatly advance environmental law in Algeria. Under his guidance, new specialized institutions have been established with the aim of creating and implementing an environmental policy, which is at the service of sustainable development.
He has also established model financial and economic instruments aimed at promoting a tax system in Algeria based on international criteria that adhere to the polluter pays principle. He has brought a fundamental contribution to the implementation of the National Action Plan for Environment and Sustainable Development. This approach, adopted by the Algerian Government, is based on four major objectives: improving the health and quality of life; improving the productivity of natural capital; reducing economic losses and improving competitiveness; and improving the global environment (e.g. reducing greenhouse gases and impacts of climate change).
Mr. Rahmani has made significant contributions in his capacity as President of the Foundation ‘Deserts du Monde’ and as Honorary Spokesperson of the United Nations International Year of Deserts and Desertification. For example, the creation of the Institute of Deserts and the Museum of Deserts, the rehabilitation of Fort de Tinerkouk, the International Conference on the Biodiversity of Deserts (Brazil), the International Conference on Women and Desertification (Italy), the Second International Symposium on Desertification and Migration (Spain) and the International Scientific Conference on Deserts and Desertification (Tunisia), as well as the organization of the Third Festival of Cultures and Civilizations of the People of the Deserts.
It is hard to believe now, but when the first science pointing to the link between chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) and the degradation of the Earth’s ozone layer was revealed in 1974, it was met with widespread scepticism.
That we now have behind us decades of action under the Montreal Protocol, which has reversed the growth of the hole in the ozone layer and saved millions of people around the world from developing skin cancer, is down to the dedication and single-minded vision of a small group of scientists.
Mario José Molina-Pasquel Henríquez, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry Laureate, first uncovered the link between CFCs and the ozone layer—along with Paul Crutzen and Sherwood Rowland—at a time when nobody else even dreamt there was a problem. They published their research in the journal Nature and, at a press conference held by the American Chemical Society in September 1974, took the brave and unprecedented step of calling for a complete ban on further releases of CFCs into the atmosphere—in essence challenging an industry that was raking in massive profits for corporations.
It was not until 1985 that scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a large hole in the ozone layer over the Earth's southern hemisphere, which was expanding at the same rate as occurrences of skin cancer in Australia and other southern hemisphere countries. The discovery vindicated Molina and his colleagues and galvanized public support for the regulation of ozone-depleting substances, which came in 1985 when 20 nations—including most of the major CFC producers—signed the Vienna Convention (now known as the Montreal Protocol).
When US President Barack Obama awarded Molina the Presidential Medal of Freedom in August 2013, he referred to him as “a visionary chemist and environmental scientist”. Without such vision, we would not have addressed one of the biggest environmental challenges of the day. Molina’s principles and belief in science, so unfairly dismissed by so many, serve as a touchstone for the environmental community today, as scientists stand by their unwavering commitment to convince the world of the need for urgent action on climate change and other pressing issues.
Dr. Ramanathan is a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. In the 1970s, he discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs and numerous other manmade trace gases, and forecasted in 1980 that global warming would be detectable by the year 2000. He, along with Paul Crutzen, led an international team that first discovered the presence of widespread Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs).
Dr. Ramanathan showed that ABCs led to large-scale dimming, decreased monsoon rainfall and rice harvest in India, and played a dominant role in the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. His team developed unmanned aerial vehicles with miniaturized instruments to measure black carbon in soot over South Asia and to track pollution from Beijing during the Olympics. Now a member of Climate and Clean Air Coalition’s Science Advisory Panel, he has estimated that the reduction of black carbon can reduce global warming significantly. He is following this up with a climate mitigation initiative called Project Surya, which aims to reduce soot emissions from bio-fuel cooking in rural India.
Surya has successfully completed a pilot phase in a North Indian village with a population of 2,500. It is now embarking on the demonstration phase, in which it will cover a rural area of approximately 100 square kilometers with around 50,000 people in the densely populated Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. Within this area, Surya plans to replace traditional cooking methods with less-polluting options that utilize renewable or cleaner fuels. Surya aims to make its approach to climate mitigation a government policy in collaboration with intergovernmental organizations such as UNEP.
Carlo Petrini founded Slow Food in 1986 as a response to the opening of a McDonald’s outlet in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Today the movement exists in over 150 countries and has a network of over 100,000 members and supporters. Slow Food International is responsible for publishing periodicals, books, and guides in many languages around the world.
Since its “Puebla Declaration” in 2007, Slow Food has become a force to be reckoned with and probably the only international organization that integrates concerns about the environment, tradition, labour, health and animal welfare with real cooking, taste and pleasure.
Slow Food encourages and supports Indigenous peoples to uphold their food traditions as the custodians of irreplaceable inherited knowledge, in particular through the Presidia projects and the Terra Madre network of food communities. In 2011 the first Indigenous Terra Madre international forum was held and in May 2012 Petrini became the first guest speaker in history at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
The Terra Madre network comprises 250 universities and research centers, including 450 individual academics throughout the world. All are committed, within their own fields and using the tools available to them, to further the preservation and growth of sustainable food production — through both public education and food-worker training.
The Slow Food Foundation operates around the world with projects to defend local food traditions, protect local biodiversity and promote small-scale quality products, with an increasing focus on the Global South. These projects help to protect small producers and to preserve the quality of artisan products from Tibetan cheese makers producing yak milk cheese at 4500 meters of altitude, nomadic fishermen on the Banc d'Arguin in Mauritania, small farmers in Bronte, Sicily who pick pistachio nuts by hand on the slopes of Etna, and the curadoras de semillas in Chile who still preserve the ancient breed of the blue egg chicken.
In October 2004, Petrini founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences, an international academic institution in Northern Italy that is the first university specifically devoted to studying the inextricable links between food and cultures.
Dr. Van der Leeuw has spent his career studying human-environment relations and invention and innovation in society, applying the lessons learned from history to help understand why humanity is not facing up to the long-term issue of environmental change.
He works at Arizona State University as Dean of the School of Sustainability and Foundation Professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. An archaeologist and medieval historian by training, Dr. Van der Leeuw has studied ancient technologies, ancient and modern man-land relationships, and Complex Systems Theory. He has done archaeological fieldwork in Syria, Holland, and France, and conducted ethno-archaeological studies in the Near East, the Philippines and Mexico.
He coordinated a series of trans-disciplinary research projects on socio-natural interactions and modern environmental problems in the countries of the Northern Mediterranean rim (ARCHAEOMEDES I and II and others, 1991-2000). Among these were studies aimed at understanding and modelling the natural and anthropogenic causes of desertification, land degradation and land abandonment, as well as the interaction between towns and countryside. These projects were the first to choose the Complex Adaptive Systems approach to help solve 'hairy' problems such as these.
More recently, he has been studying the phenomenon of innovation. The Information Society as a Complex System (ISCOM, 2003-2006) project investigated the relationship between innovation and urban dynamics. With an extensive research team, he investigated how invention occurs, what the preconditions are, how the context influences it, and its role in society. He is currently involved in applying Complex Systems approaches to the study of this phenomenon in the United States, and in particular in Phoenix.
In July 2001, he was appointed Secretary-General of the French National Council for the Coordination of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This was followed by an appointment as Deputy Director at the National Institute for the Sciences of the Universe and for Social Sciences at the CNRS (2002-2003) in France, in charge of a program similar to the Long-Term Ecological Research programme in the US.
Prior to his current roles, he taught at Leyden (1972-1976), Amsterdam (1976-1985), Cambridge (UK; 1985-1995) and Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne; 1995-2003). His publications include 17 books and over 120 papers and articles on archaeology, ancient technologies, socio-environmental and sustainability issues, as well as invention and innovation. He is an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute, a corresponding member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and an emeritus Chair of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Mr. Ba-Jammal has had a truly pioneering influence on environmental protection in Yemen - a country which faces acute challenges from water scarcity to desertification. During his time as Minister and then Prime Minister, he established Yemen's Ministry of Water and Environment and Environment Protection Authority, solicited national and international funding for environmental conservation and sustainable water management, and implemented a series of groundbreaking environmental policies in Yemen and its region.
Mr. Ba-Jammal also orchestrated conservation efforts for the Socotra archipelago, a site of global importance for biodiversity. The Socotra conservation fund came into being under his patronage, and the archipelago was listed as a UNESCO Man and Biosphere reserve in 2003.
Among other achievements, Mr. Ba-Jammal also supported the declaration of several marine and land protected areas in Yemen and established a state agency for the development of Yemeni islands with a focus on marine resources conservation. Along with Mr. Ba-Jammal's work on Yemen's water sector, all these projects serve as key examples of environmental awareness in a region where water and conservation issues are of vital importance - increasingly so in a climate-constrained world.
By setting a carbon neutral goal for New Zealand, Prime Minister Helen Clark has put her country at the forefront of today's environmental challenges. Three major policy initiatives launched by Miss Clark are also blazing new trails for sustainability and the fight against climate change: the Emissions Trading Scheme; the Energy Strategy; and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy.
Miss Clark's policies champion renewable energy and energy efficiency across key sectors of the economy. Her government is also achieving substantial work on environmental protection, from forestry and agriculture to improving public awareness and boosting private sector involvement in sustainability.
New Zealand will be hosting this year's World Environment Day - one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action. The event will take place on 5 June 2008 with the slogan "Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy".
The word “legend” is one that should be applied with judicious care, but few deserve the tag more than Dr. Sylvia Earle—a renowned pioneer of deep sea exploration and conservation so synonymous with the topics that she now has a Lego figurine modelled after her, complete with little yellow flippers.
Consider the titles, official and unofficial, handed to her by some of the world’s most prestigious organizations: she was referred to as her “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times; “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress; and, in 1998, the very first “Hero for the Planet” by Time magazine.
The internationally renowned marine biologist, ocean explorer, author and lecturer has logged more than 7,000 hours underwater across over 100 expeditions—including leading the first team of women aquanauts and setting a record for solo diving to a depth of 1,000-metres. She was the first woman to serve as the Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, since 1998, has been Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.
The long hours beneath the waves, only a few months short of a full year, demonstrate the astonishing passion Dr. Earle has displayed in her chosen field. Her special focus is on developing a network of areas on the land and in the ocean—global “hope spots”—to safeguard the living systems underpinning the global processes that maintain biodiversity, yield life-support services and provide stability and resiliency to ecosystems.
Dr. Earle’s achievements appear as boundless as the oceans she works so hard to protect. She is the founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research Inc., of Mission Blue and of the Sylvia Earle Alliance. She is also chair of the Harte Research Institute’s Advisory Board, Chair of the Advisory Council for the Ocean in Google Earth, and leader of the National Geographic Society Sustainable Seas Expeditions.
Her more than 100 national and international honours include the 2011 Royal Geographical Society Gold Medal, the 2011 Medal of Honour from the Dominican Republic, the 2009 TED Prize, and the Netherlands Order of the Golden Ark.
Dr. Earle embodies the spirit and values of UNEP’s Champions of the Earth, and her work will undoubtedly live long in memory and motivate others to follow in the wake of her ever-flapping flippers.
