After earning a degree in engineering, a doctorate in Earth Science and a professorship at Queens College and Columbia University, Dr. Taro Takahashi is now a Senior Scholar at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Dr. Takahashi has devoted five decades of his life to discovering how carbon cycles through oceans, land and atmosphere, and his work is the foundation upon which all carbon-cycle research is now built.
Dr. Takahashi found that the majority of global CO2 resided in the ocean. He also made many important observations of oceanic absorption and its variation depending on water temperature and seasons. Dr. Takahashi explains that his main research “is aimed at understanding the fate of industrial CO2 released in the air” and hopes that his study “will lead to a better understanding and hence to a reliable prediction of the oceans’ capacity to absorb industrial CO2”. The idea is to estimate the extent of the capacity of the oceans as a climate regulator.
With financial support from the Ford Company, which recognized him with the Ford Award in 2004, he has been studying how climate change may alter interactions between land and oceans, as well as the solutions for mitigating these alterations.
“He initiated the methods we all use,” said Richard Feely, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies El Niño and carbon cycling. “Just about everyone who has worked with him has benefited from his wisdom and advice.”
Zhou Xun, one of China’s most popular actresses, spends much of her time promoting ‘tips for green living’ through Our Part, a campaign she runs jointly with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The actress encourages people to reduce their carbon footprint through simple changes in lifestyle, something that can make a huge difference in a country the size of China.
Zhou Xun points out that if every car-owning family in China drove just 200 km less in a year, carbon dioxide emissions would be cut by 460,000 tons. She also states that small efforts like unplugging appliances can make a huge impact in China, a country with 300 million TV sets and 500 million mobile phones.
She works on reducing her own carbon footprint and follows her tips in her own day-to-day life. She takes her own chopsticks, mugs and shopping bags with her wherever she goes and tries to convince others to use reusable products. She plants three trees for every 200 km of her car travel and is planting many more to offset her flights from 2008. And when it’s feasible, she bikes or walks to her destinations.
Zhou Xun was named a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for China in 2008 with a special focus of promoting environmental sustainability and will be the Green Ambassador for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
Small Island Developing States are on the frontline of the war against climate change, both in terms of suffering the greatest damage and calling most stridently for action. Palau, a low-lying archipelago in the Pacific Ocean home to just over 20,000 souls, is one such country. The small islands that make up Palau are breath-taking in their beauty—splodges of bright green and gold in azure waters teeming with life. Yet these natural wonders are threatened by coral bleaching, rising sea levels and drought—and according to H.E. Tommy Remengesau, Jr, Palau’s experience serves as the canary in the mineshaft to the rest of the world faced with growing climate change.
While raising his voice in warning, President Remengesau, one of Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment, is also fighting to ensure his nation survives these threats through national initiatives that protect biodiversity and the ecotourism and diving industries—which together bring tens of thousands of tourists to the tiny islands each year. As President Remengesau has said on many occasions, “The economy is our environment and the environment is our economy.”
Under his presidency, Palau sought to make this environmental economy robust enough to withstand the coming changes. He established a Protected Area Network for the country’s marine biodiversity, which has generated U$1.3 million a year in green fees for community conservation since 2009. Thanks to this commitment to marine conservation, Palau has also become the world’s first shark sanctuary—leading the way for many other countries, including the Maldives, Honduras, and Marshall Islands to designate areas of their surrounding waters as shark sanctuaries.
President from 2001 to 2009, and elected again in 2013, his inspirational leadership has extended well beyond Micronesia to influence the global governance of oceans. Along with President James Michel of Seychelles, President Remengesau established the Global Island Partnership, which provides leadership and support to dozens of island states, and has mobilized more than $130 million for conservation and livelihoods on islands.
Palau may be small, but with President Remengesau at the helm, it has a big voice.
Dr. Atiq Rahman is an eloquent advocate for sustainable development from Bangladesh- a country highly vulnerable to climate change and flooding. As one of the top specialists in his field, the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) transformed the NGO into a leading think-tank in South Asia on sustainable development issues.
Dr. Rahman's extensive publications on the subjects of environment and development in Bangladesh are a reference for his peers, and he has also developed an innovative post-graduate course on sustainable development and North-South dialogue.
With his national and international experience in environment and resource management, Dr. Rahman's expertise remains vital throughout the Asia Pacific region and beyond as he helps to raise awareness of the hazards of global warming.
For the last thirty years, Timothy E. Wirth has been an advocate for environmental issues in the United States. As the president of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, Mr. Wirt has established the environment as a key priority and is mobilizing strong resources to address crucial issues from biodiversity to climate change and renewable energy.
A strong supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, Mr. Wirth was instrumental in raising awareness and calling for policy action on global warming during his time as US Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs.
Mr. Wirth was also a steadfast advocate on environmental issues during his time as a member of the US Senate, when he engaged in a number of conservation and natural resource issues in his state of Colorado. Mr. Wirth authored the Colorado Wilderness Bill as well as other successful legislation on energy, conservation and environmental protection.
Despite repeated warnings and unassailable scientific evidence on the climate consequences of the brown economy, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Some prefer to assign blame to the failure of international treaties to curb emissions, yet there is so much that can be done by simple changes to the way we design and run our homes and places of work and leisure. This is why the work of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), a private not-for-profit organization that is transforming buildings across the globe, is so crucial.
The USGBC has produced outstanding results in sustainable building through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), which is currently the most widely used green building program worldwide. In the United States alone, buildings account for 40 per cent of energy use and incur losses of S$130 billion annually from inefficient design. Worldwide, one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings; LEED is zeroing in on reducing this astonishing figure.
In little over two decades, the USGBC has gone from its first meeting in the boardroom of the American Institute of Architects, with 60 firms and a few not-for-profit organizations, to 76 chapters, nearly 13,000 member companies and organizations, and more than 198,000 LEED certified professionals. LEED is certifying 1.7 million square feet of building space daily in 150 countries and territories – the equivalent of about 45 football fields.
The USBGC also lobbies policymakers to implement greener building design, and is convinced that greater building efficiency can meet 85 per cent of future demand for energy in the United States alone. It supported the introduction of the Better Buildings Act of 2014 into the United States House of Representatives—a bill that would amend federal law aimed at improving the energy efficiency of commercial office buildings. It was one of eight national councils that helped found the World Green Building Council.
For climate change to one day be consigned to the dustbin of history as a challenge humanity faced and overcame, organizations and individuals need to play their part to change how we live our lives in support of top-down change. The USBGC demonstrates clearly that such change is eminently possible.
His Excellency Mohamed Nasheed has been the President of the Maldives since 2008. He has received global recognition for his efforts to curb climate change and raise awareness of environmental issues, particularly as it related to island-nations.
He featured prominently in the international media in the run-up to, and during, the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. During that time, he even convened an underwater cabinet meeting on the ocean floor to highlight the grave climate change-related threats to the Maldives.
President Nasheed has pledged to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral country by 2020. He has warned that Maldivians may be forced to seek a new homeland should rising sea levels make the Maldivians’ archipelago uninhabitable.
Moreover, he is campaigning for the protection of coral reefs that helped save his country from the devastating 2005 tsunami by absorbing the brunt of the powerful earthquake-triggered wave.
President Nasheed, a former journalist who was jailed several times for his articles, formed the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) while in self-proclaimed exile. He returned to the Maldives in 2005 to begin promoting the MDP. In 2008, President Nasheed won the country’s first ever multiparty presidential election by popular vote.
He has received several awards in recognition of his pioneering environmental work: Time Magazine named him a 2009 Hero of the Environment, and ‘The Age of Stupid’, the film on the devastating effects of climate change, presented him with an award at the film’s global premiere in New York City during Global Climate Week in September 2009.
President Nasheed continues to urge various leaders from developing or vulnerable countries like the Maldives to break away from carbon-based growth and to embrace green technologies for a carbon neutral future.
Afghanistan’s 46-year-old Director General of the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), Prince Mostapha Zaher has laid the foundation for a sustainable and peaceful future in Afghanistan. For the past five years, he has worked tirelessly for the environment in a country ravaged by 25 years of war and continues to find ways to bring clean, efficient and cost-effective solutions to the citizens of one of the world’s poorest nations.
In 2004, after the fall of the Taliban, Zaher and his family returned to his homeland where he gave up his post as Ambassador to Italy to take up the job as Director General of the newly formed NEPA. The opportunity revived Zaher’s lifelong dream of turning the royal hunting grounds into a nature reserve open to all Afghans.
Since taking the post, he has rewritten the nation’s environmental laws, including an act in the Constitution declaring it the responsibility of every Afghan citizen to “protect the environment, conserve the environment, and to hand it over to the next generation in the most pristine condition possible”.
In 2008, he attended the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC), where he pledged to improve air quality in Kabul between 10-12 per cent by the year 2012. His commitments work in tandem with Afghanistan’s Environment Act of 2006. At the same time, NEPA announced it would allocate at least 3 per cent of its core budget to environmental research and development.
In partnership with the Ministry of Energy and Water and the international community, NEPA hopes to apply cutting edge solar and wind technology to address environmental concerns in Afghanistan.
Dr. Balgis Osman-Elasha, a senior scientist from Sudan, is at the forefront of global research on climate change. A leading author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, she has produced groundbreaking work on global warming - the defining challenge of our era - in Africa, with an emphasis on northern and eastern Africa.
Dr. Osman-Elasha's emphasis on global warming and adaptation in Sudan is vital given the strong interlinkages between climate change and conflict in the country. Her work as a prominent researcher on climate change makes her a true role model for women in Africa.
The award also recognizes Dr. Osman-Elasha's efforts to educate Sudanese university students about the issue of climate change, thus raising awareness among the country's new generation.
For outstanding courage in fighting the illegal wildlife trade at community level
The Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit is a majority women group of rangers, founded by Transfrontier Africa to protect the Olifants West Region of Balule Nature Reserve, part of Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa. The area where the Black Mambas operate is a free-range savannah ecosystem with open borders to the Kruger National Park. The highly endangered Black Rhino and also the endangered white rhino are strongly represented in the area.
Since the unit went into operation in 2013, the number of rhinos lost to poaching has plummeted, snaring and illegal bush-meat incidents have been reduced by 75 per cent, and nine poacher incursions have been detected, leading to the arrests of the offenders. The 26 unarmed members of the unit conduct foot-patrols, observations, vehicle checks and, road blocks, as well as educating their peers on the importance of conservation and gathering intelligence from their communities.
Restoring dignity and self-worth, and empowering communities to play their part, is a crucial component of efforts to combat the illegal wildlife trade across the globe, and the Black Mambas are an outstanding example of success. Their brave actions are sending the message to others in South Africa and beyond that communities themselves can prevent the illegal wildlife trade—which threatens not only iconic species such as rhino and elephants, but puts money in the hands of criminal gangs, thus increasing insecurity, and threatens livelihoods.
