If a picture is worth a thousand words, for Maria Kolesnikova, this year’s Champion of the Earth for Entrepreneurial Vision, a picture was worth starting a movement.
It was 2016 and Kolesnikova, a public relations professional, then aged 28, was volunteering for MoveGreen, a youth-led environmental organization in the Kyrgyz Republic.
There, someone showed Kolesnikova a picture of Bishkek, looking down from the mountains that surround the Kyrgyz capital. “Only you couldn’t see the city,” she said. “Bishkek was just covered in this blanket of grey. We didn’t know what to call it; what we knew was that it was really bad.”
Bishkek, home to roughly 1 million people is among the world’s cities with the worst air pollution. During winter months, it is often trapped under a dome of smog derived both from its natural environment – the city’s temperature is, on average, 5°C warmer than its surroundings – and smoke from the coal used to heat most homes. “We wanted to understand more about what was in the air that we were breathing, and what data the city was collecting in order to try and make things better,” said Kolesnikova. “But we didn’t find any relevant, actual data – either it was not being collected or it was not being shared. So, we decided to produce data ourselves.”
A modest beginning
MoveGreen started with just three sensors to measure air quality, namely, by monitoring for the first time in the Kyrgyz Republic, the levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) – produced by burning coal and other fuels, combustion, and dust. In high enough concentrations, it can cause inflammation of the lungs and other respiratory illnesses. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes up to 7 million deaths every year.
When the first measurements came back, Kolesnikova and the team at MoveGreen took a bold decision. Launching a campaign called “School Breathes Easily”, they took their message to a population that was ready to listen: Bishkek’s schoolchildren. Globally, 93 per cent of children live in environments where air pollution levels are above WHO guidelines. Around 600,000 die prematurely each year because of air pollution, and exposure to dirty air can also impair cognitive and motor development and puts children at greater risk for chronic disease later in life.
In Bishkek, sensors were installed in schools to measure air quality so that classrooms could keep their windows closed when the air pollution was too much. Educators also used the data to warn parents about keeping their children from being exposed to the fine particulates. Today, there are over 100 sensors installed in the city and region.
The success of the school-based campaign encouraged Kolesnikova, who by this time had risen to become the Director of MoveGreen. It was not enough to collect the data; a movement was needed to convince decision-makers to improve Bishkek’s air quality.
MoveGreen developed an app, now available globally, called AQ.kg a real-time collector and transmitter of actionable data about air quality. The application aggregates data every 20 minutes from the two largest Kyrgyz cities, Bishkek and Osh, about the concentration of pollutants in the air, including the tiny particle PM2.5 and its larger cousin, PM10.
“Our data has been challenged, our methods have been challenged – by those who say that citizen monitoring data is unreliable,” said Kolesnikova. “But we kept having meetings and we kept going back and now, they listen. The result of our work has been connection with the government, to improve environmental monitoring in Bishkek, to do a better job of monitoring and reducing emissions.”
“Kolesnikova’s work reflects how individuals and citizens can drive environmental change by leveraging the power of science and data”, said Inger Andersen Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. “So often, people wonder if there’s anything they can do to combat pollution, climate change and the other threats to the planet. Maria Kolesnikova proves that there is. Her dedication is remarkable and shows that we can all play a role in putting the planet on the path to a better future.”
Future plans
MoveGreen’s plans in coming months include calling for policies at the municipal and national level to develop bills that require regular public information sessions about the results of air quality measurements. The Kyrgyz Republic has committed to global targets to fight climate change, including an unconditional goal of reducing Green House Gas emissions by over 16 per cent by 2025.
There are immense opportunities for alternative energy sources; just 10 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s hydropower potential has been developed, and other renewable energy options could include boosting heating and electricity supply through wind, solar and biogas. There are immense opportunities for alternative energy sources; just 10 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s hydropower potential has been developed, and other renewable energy options could include boosting heating and electricity supply through solar, wind, a biogas, a fuel often produced from agricultural waste.
According to Kolesnikova, if there was more investment in science in Kyrgyzstan, the country would be able to engineer its own solutions and create an eco-friendly society that exists in harmony with the nature around it, including her beloved mountains.
Because air pollution has no borders, Kolesnikova and MoveGreen are entering into regional arrangements with other Central Asian countries. Her goal is to convince the region’s six states to collaborate on ways to tackle air pollution in their growing cities. Putting in place systems and standards to assess air quality will be critical. A recent UNEP study found that only 57 countries continuously monitor air quality, while 104 have no monitoring infrastructure in place.
Kolesnikova says she’s driven by the desire to make the world a better place.
“So often, you can get demotivated as an activist – you work so hard, don't see results of your endeavors and, finally, you feel like you don’t want to keep going. But then you realize, no. Someone has to take responsibility for the future. Why shouldn’t it be me?”
The United Nations Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth and the Young Champions of the Earth recognize individuals, groups and organizations whose actions have a transformative impact on the environment. Presented annually, the Champions of the Earth award is the UN’s highest environmental honour.
The United Nations General Assembly has declared the years 2021 through 2030 the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations together with the support of partners, it is designed to prevent, halt, and reverse the loss and degradation of ecosystems worldwide. It aims at reviving billions of hectares, covering terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems. A global call to action, the UN Decade draws together political support, scientific research, and financial muscle to massively scale up restoration. Visit www.decadeonrestoration.org to learn more.
Saihanba Afforestation Community won in the Inspiration and Action category for transforming degraded land into a lush paradise.
Saihanba, which covers 92,000 hectares and borders the southern edge of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, had by the 1950s become barren due to excessive logging, allowing sand to blow into Beijing from the northern deserts. In 1962, hundreds of foresters began planting trees in the area.
Three generations of these foresters have increased forest cover from 11.4 to 80 per cent. The forest now supplies 137 million cubic meters of clean water to the Beijing and Tianjin areas each year, while discharging c. 550,000 metric tons of oxygen. It has spurred economic growth with green sectors, generating USD15.1 million in 2016 alone.
“In the 55 years the farm has existed, people have been growing trees and protecting the forest like their own children,” said Liu Haiying, director of Saihanba Afforestation Community. “I believe that, as long as we continue to promote ecological civilization, generation after generation, China can create more green miracles like Saihanba and achieve harmony between humans and nature.”
Wang Wenbiao, Chairman of Elion Resources Group, won a Lifetime Achievement award for a lifetime of leadership in green industry.
Better known in China as the “Son of the Desert”, Wang, 61, is the chairman of China’s largest private green industries enterprise, Elion Resources Group, with total assets of over USD 1.6 billion.
Wang bought the Hangjinqi Saltworks in the middle of the Kubuqi desert in 1988. He quickly realized that the saltworks’ financial woes, and the problems with livelihoods in the region, were down to the desert: sand interfering with production and making it difficult to transport products out.
He partnered with local communities and the Beijing government to combat desertification in the desert, which covers around 18,600 sq km in Inner Mongolia. Centuries of grazing had stripped the land, leaving around 70,000 people struggling to survive. Now around two-thirds of the desert has been greened and local communities have jobs and a more pleasant environment. UN Environment Programme research estimated the project has a net value of $1.8 billion dollars over 50 years.
The project shows how private industry can both turn a healthy profit and make a massive positive contribution to climate change, sustainable development and many other environmental issues.
“My only life goal is to combat desertification for a greener world, with more lush mountains with clear water, which I always value as silver and gold mountains,” Wang said.
In November 2007, Wang was elected as the Vice-Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and in 2008 won the China Charity Award. In January 2012, he won the title of ‘Chinese Model Worker in Green Work’ for the second time.
Mobike won in the Entrepreneurial Vision category for exploring market-driven solutions to air pollution and climate change.
Mobike is the world’s largest smart bike-sharing company. After two years of operation, the platform claims over 100 million registered users across more than 100 cities globally, servicing over 20 million rides a day.
Air pollution is a massive problem, particularly in countries like China and India, claiming an estimated 6.5 million lives each year. Bike sharing is a crucial alternative to motorized transport, and companies like Mobike are leading the way in cutting out journeys that contribute to air pollution and climate change.
According to figures collated by the company, Mobike users have cycled more than 18.2 billion kilometres, avoiding 4.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to taking 1.24 million cars off the road for a year.
Every Mobike bike has a GPS tracker, and the company collects bikes that don’t move or are unused – although they are designed to be maintenance-free for four years. The company also has an incentive/disincentive scheme, giving bonus points for proper parking to encourage users to leave their bikes in designated areas.
Mobike has also teamed up with US chemical firm, Dow, to conduct research on creating more eco-friendly bikes after reports of unsustainable manufacturing practices.
“It is a tremendous honour to receive this award,” said Mobike’s Founder and President, Hu Weiwei. “Combating climate change, through [pursuing] the United Nations sustainable development goals, is one of the world’s most important priorities, and we commit to using our technology and innovation to help governments and businesses join us in creating a pedal-powered green economy.”
For her stalwart commitment to quantifying the effects of climate change and her tireless efforts to transform attitudes, Canadian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe was chosen as the Champion of the Earth for science and innovation.
One of the world’s most influential communicators on climate change, Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies what climate change means to people and the places where we live. She evaluates long-term observations, future scenarios and global models and develops innovative strategies that translate future projections into relevant, actionable information that stakeholders can use to inform future planning for food, water, infrastructure and more in a changing climate.
Hayhoe has served as a lead author for a number of key reports, including the US Global Change Research Program’s Second, Third and Fourth National Climate Assessments and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s What We Know and How We Respond reports. She also serves on advisory committees for a broad range of organizations from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum to the Earth Science Women’s Network to the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. She has received honorary doctorates from Colgate University and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
However, Hayhoe may be best-known for bridging the broad, deep gap between scientists and Christians -- work she does because she is a Christian herself. While completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, she took a class in climate science that altered the trajectory of her life forever. Learning that climate change is a threat multiplier that affects nearly every aspect of life on this planet -- most critically poverty, hunger, injustice and humanitarian crises -- she abandoned her plans to become an astrophysicist and instead pursued a Masters and Ph.D. in atmospheric science at the University of Illinois in order to, as she says, give voice to the experiences of those suffering the impacts of a changing climate.
Her work in public engagement centers around what she sees as the single most important thing that everyone can do to fight climate change -- talk about it. She does so through many avenues, including hosting the PBS digital YouTube series, Global Weirding: Climate, Politics and Religion; co-authoring a book on climate and Christian values with her husband Andrew Farley, a pastor, author and radio host; participating in hundreds of interviews, talks, podcasts, documentaries, classes and more across the US and beyond each year; actively engaging with the public via social media and online forums; and, most recently, authoring an upcoming book on how to talk about climate change.
As a result, she has been named by Christianity Today as one of their 50 Women to Watch, one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in 2014, FORTUNE’s 50 greatest world leaders and listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers, twice, in 2014 and again in 2019. She has also received a host of awards including the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Award, the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service Award and the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication.
While grateful for the public recognition that awards convey, Hayhoe says the most important element of her work is changing minds.
“What means the most to me personally is when just one person tells me sincerely that they had never cared about climate change before, or even thought that it was real: but now, because of something they heard me say, they’ve changed their mind. That’s what makes it all worthwhile,” she wrote on her website.
Champions of the Earth is the United Nations’ flagship global environmental award. It was established by the UN Environment Programme in 2005 to celebrate outstanding figures whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. From world leaders to environmental defenders and technology inventors, the awards recognize trailblazers who are working to protect our planet for the next generation.
Previous winners of the Champions of the Earth award in the science and innovation category include Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat in 2018 for producing a sustainable alternative to beef burgers, Australian designer Leyla Acaroglu in 2016 for her work on sustainability and leading atmospheric chemist Sir Robert Watson in 2014.
For turning the green good deeds of half a billion people into green trees planted in some of China’s most arid regions, Ant Forest mini-programme has been awarded Champion of the Earth for inspiration and action.
Launched by Ant Financial Services Group, an Alibaba affiliate, Ant Forest promotes greener lifestyles by inspiring users to reduce carbon emissions in their daily lives. When they do, Ant Forest rewards them with ‘green energy’ points, which can be used to plant a real tree.
The aim is to combat desertification, lower air pollution and protect the environment.
Ant Forest users are encouraged to record their low-carbon footprint through daily actions like taking public transport or paying utility bills online. For each action, they receive ‘green energy’ points and when they accumulate a certain number of points, an actual tree is planted. Users can view images of their trees in real-time via satellite.
The Ant Forest platform is also exploring innovative solutions to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of local people by leveraging the power of digital technology.
Since its launch in August 2016, Ant Forest and its NGO partners have planted around 122 million trees in some of China’s driest areas, including in desert regions in Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Shanxi. The trees cover an area of 112,000 hectares (1.68 million mu) and the project has become China’s largest private sector tree-planting initiative.
Business units across Alibaba are also encouraging users to take part in Ant Forest. For example, if they use the second-hand trading platform Idle Fish to recycle old items, they can earn ‘green energy’ points.
Ant Forest’s recognition as a Champion of the Earth highlights the importance of ecosystem restoration in reducing the emissions fuelling climate change. In March 2019, the United Nations underlined the urgent need to protect the natural systems that sustain life by declaring the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration from 2021-2030.
China has long been committed to reforestation to improve its environment and tackle climate change. Authorities aim to increase the area of land covered by forests from 21.7 per cent in 2016 to 23 per cent by 2020. Since 1978, the country has been building a 4,500-kilometre Green Great Wall, also known as the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program, along the edges of its northern deserts to hold back the expanding Gobi desert and prevent soil erosion and land degradation.
Champions of the Earth is the United Nations’ flagship global environmental award. It was established by the UN Environment Programme in 2005 to celebrate outstanding figures whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. From world leaders to environmental defenders and technology inventors, the awards recognize trailblazers who are working to protect our planet for the next generation.
The awards have recognized innovations and change-makers, particularly in the field of renewable energy.
In 2018, the Zhejiang Green Rural Revival Programme won the award for inspiration and action for its work to regenerate polluted waterways and damaged lands; also in 2018, Cochin International Airport, the world’s first solar power airport, won the award for entrepreneurial vision; and in 2017, the Saihanba Afforestation Community was recognized in the inspiration and action category for transforming degraded land on the southern edge of Inner Mongolia into a lush paradise.
A celebrated world leader in sustainability, Costa Rica has been chosen as Champion of the Earth for policy leadership because of its pioneering role in the protection of nature and its commitment to ambitious policies to combat climate change.
Notably, the Central American nation has drafted a detailed plan to decarbonize its economy by 2050, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. It hopes to provide a template for other nations to do the same and curb the deadly emissions causing rapid, disastrous climate change.
“The decarbonization plan consists of maintaining an upward curve in terms of economic employment growth, and at the same time generating a downward curve in the use of fossil fuels in order to stop polluting. How are we going to achieve that? Through clean public transport, smart and resilient cities, sound waste management, sustainable agriculture and improved logistics,” said President Carlos Alvarado Quesada.
The plan includes bold mid- and long-term targets to reform transport, energy, waste and land use. The aim is to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, meaning the country will produce no more emissions than it can offset through actions such as maintaining and expanding its forests.
Costa Rica’s success in placing environmental concerns at the heart of its political and economic policies shows that sustainability is both achievable and economically viable. Officials say Costa Rica aims to change the paradigm of development, envisioning a consumption and production system that generates an environmental surplus rather than a deficit.
“In 2050, although it seems very distant, I hope I can tell my son, who is six years old now, and by then will be my age, that we did the right thing, we did what had to be done so that he could live in a better world, mainly because we tackled the effects of climate change,” President Alvarado Quesada said.
Costa Rica’s environmental credentials are impressive: more than 95 per cent of its energy is renewable, forest cover stands at more than 50 per cent after painstaking work to reverse decades of deforestation and around half of the country’s land is under some degree of protection.
In 2017, the country ran for a record 300 days solely on renewable power. The aim is to achieve 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030. Seventy per cent of all buses and taxis are expected to be electric by 2030, with full electrification projected for 2050.
Costa Rica’s groundbreaking role in promoting clean technologies and sustainability is all the more remarkable for the fact that the country of around 5 million people produces only 0.4 per cent of global emissions.
The Champion of the Earth award recognizes Costa Rica’s sustainability credentials and also spotlights the urgent need to find solutions to climate change. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require unprecedented changes to reduce carbon emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.
Champions of the Earth is the United Nations’ flagship global environmental award. It was established by the UN Environment Programme in 2005 to celebrate outstanding figures whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. From world leaders to environmental defenders and technology inventors, the awards recognize trailblazers who are working to protect our planet for the next generation.
Previous laureates from the region include Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile, for her outstanding leadership in creating marine protected areas and for boosting renewable energy (2017), former Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixeira for her visionary leadership and key role in reversing deforestation of the Amazon (2013) and Mexican ecologist José Sarukhán Kermez for a lifetime of leadership and innovation in the conservation of biodiversity in Mexico and around the world (2016).
In 2010, Costa Rica was awarded the Future Policy Award by the World Future Council in recognition of its 1998 biodiversity law, which was held up as a model for other nations to follow.
Fridays for Future is a dynamic global student movement pushing for immediate action on climate change through active campaigning and advocacy. It was chosen as Champion of the Earth for inspiration and action because of its role in highlighting the devastating effects of climate change.
Fridays for Future has millions of passionate activists who insist that their voices be heard on what many see as the defining issue of their generation. The movement was inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who sat in protest in front of the Swedish parliament for three weeks last year to draw attention to the climate emergency.
Now every month, students around the world take to the streets to demand that politicians do more to acknowledge and act upon the reality and severity of climate change. These regular marches have attracted more than one million young people in more than 100 countries. As Thunberg says: “Everybody is welcome. Everybody is needed”.
The Fridays for Future movement has electrified the global conversation about climate change at a time when the window of opportunity to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures is closing. Global emissions are reaching record levels and show no sign of peaking. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying and extreme weather events are becoming more common and more destructive around the world.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has said he understands the anger of the youth and that their voices give him hope for the future.
In June, Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement were honoured with Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award, which celebrates people who have shown unique leadership and courage in standing up for human rights.
The passion and energy displayed by the members of the Fridays for Future movement offer hope that global leaders can be persuaded to act to reduce carbon emissions within 12 years and hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C and even, as asked by the latest science, to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Champions of the Earth is the United Nations’ flagship global environmental award. It was established by the UN Environment Programme in 2005 to celebrate outstanding figures whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. From world leaders to environmental defenders and technology inventors, the awards recognize trailblazers who are working to protect our planet for the next generation.
Previous winners of the Champions of the Earth award for inspiration and action include Afroz Shah, an Indian lawyer who organized the world’s biggest beach clean-up project in Mumbai (2016); the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit from South Africa (2015); and Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, a community-based conservation activist from Mexico (2013).
Since Patagonia was founded in 1973 by renowned environmentalist and entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard, the US outdoor apparel brand has won plaudits for its sustainable supply chains and advocacy for the environment. The company recently updated its mission statement to reflect the urgency of the environmental crisis: “We’re in business to save our home planet”.
Patagonia was chosen as Champion of the Earth for entrepreneurial vision because of a dynamic mix of policies that has put sustainability at the heart of its successful business model.
From a small company making tools for climbers, Patagonia has become a global leader in sustainability. Its drive to preserve the planet runs through the entire business from the products made and the materials used to the donation of money to environmental causes.
Patagonia describes itself as The Activist Company, and it is clear about its aims: “At Patagonia, we appreciate that all life on earth is under threat of extinction. We aim to use the resources we have—our business, our investments, our voice and our imaginations—to do something about it.”
Nearly 70 per cent of Patagonia’s products are made from recycled materials, including plastic bottles, and the goal is to use 100 per cent renewable or recycled materials by 2025. The company also uses hemp and organic cotton. It is committed to simplicity, utility and durability—a novel undertaking in a world where fast fashion is the norm for many companies and consumers.
Patagonia has a Worn Wear Program to encourage consumers to repair and recycle their products, striking a blow against the fast-fashion culture that sees customers locked in a vicious cycle of consumption and waste.
Patagonia also invests in the future. Since 1986, the company has contributed at least 1 per cent of annual sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment. In 2002, Chouinard and Craig Mathews, founder of Blue Ribbon Flies, created a non-profit organization—1% for the Planet—to encourage other companies to do the same.
Thanks to its 1 per cent pledge, Patagonia has provided more than US$100 million to grassroot organizations and helped train thousands of young activists over the past 35 years.
In 2018, Patagonia said it would give an additional US$10 million from the 2017 federal tax cut to grassroots groups defending the planet’s air, water and land, as well as those involved in the regenerative organic agriculture movement—a holistic approach to growing crops that prioritizes soil health and aims to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
Patagonia is working with around 100 small farmers who grow cotton using regenerative practices in India, and it plans to expand this to 450. The farmers control pests with traps, and weed and gather the cotton by hand. Regenerative agriculture has long been a priority for Patagonia, both for its clothing and its line of food products, Patagonia Provisions, which aims to reshape the food chain.
As part of its advocacy on environmental issues, the company has also set up Patagonia Action Works, which connects committed individuals to organizations working on environmental issues in the same community.
Champions of the Earth is the United Nations’ flagship global environmental award. It was established by the UN Environment Programme in 2005 to celebrate outstanding figures whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. Laureates have included heads of state, environmental defenders and technology pioneers.
Previous laureates in the entrepreneurial vision category include India’s Cochin International Airport, the world’s first solar power airport (2018); Paul Polman, the former Chief Executive Officer of Unilever (2015); and the U.S. Green Building Council, a private not-for-profit organization that is transforming buildings across the world (2014).
In 2017, Patagonia was awarded the Accenture Strategy Award for Circular Economy Multinational at the World Economic Forum in Davos for driving innovation and growth while reducing dependence on scarce natural resources.
The revolution began with magic markers for Robert Bullard, winner of this year’s Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement award. It was 1978 and the American sociologist and environmental activist was three years out of grad school when his wife, a lawyer, told him one day she was suing the state of Texas.
“There was a waste disposal company that was trying to place a landfill in the middle of a Black middle-class community in Houston," he recalled recently. "And she needed evidence to support a restraining order. I was all she had.”
So, with six graduate students and an armful of red, green, orange, yellow and black magic markers, Bullard set out to conduct what was one of America’s first ethnographic ‘windshield studies’, using the markers to identify neighborhoods, residents and polluting industries. What he found was sobering, though unsurprising.
In the city of Houston, where just one in four residents was Black, all city-owned landfills and six of eight city-owned incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. Three of the four privately owned landfills were located in Black neighborhoods. More than 80 percent of all the garbage in Houston – one of America’s biggest cities – was being disposed of in Black communities.
Bullard's wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, and the community group she represented would ultimately lose the class action lawsuit that followed, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. But it set an important precedent: it was America's first-ever suit against polluters charging environmental racism under civil rights law. And it set Bullard off on a course of inquiry that has grown into a movement for environmental justice.
“It was an awakening for me. I decided I am not going to do dead white men sociology. I am going to do kick-ass sociology,” said Bullard. “So, we expanded the Houston study and began to look across the southern United States – the part of the country they call Dixie. We found that environmental oppression was rooted in systemic racism. It was stamped into its DNA.”
A systemic problem
His investigations culminated in Dumping in Dixie, the first of 18 books that Bullard has authored or co-authored. It traced freed Black communities as they purchased property in the formerly slave-owning South – and the polluting companies that swiftly followed them. The book showed that in addition to being deprived of infrastructure and education, sanitation and clean water, these descendants of slaves and their families were also being exposed to higher-than-average levels of pollutants, compromising their health and well-being for generations. For far too long, said Bullard, his path was a lonely one. Environmental advocates, who were largely white, told him that racial justice was not in their wheelhouse. Civil rights groups insisted that pollution was not their problem.
“It took us almost 25 years until the two movements merged, until folks on both sides woke up to the realization that what we were experiencing in low-income and communities of colour was a form of systemic racism with detrimental health impacts,” said Bullard. “Not only that, but that these environmental disparities were having detrimental effects on life expectancy, home ownership and transformative wealth creation.”
Bullard is now a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University and Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. He has a career spanning 40 years and says his primary goal now is teaching young people how to advocate for change. He cautions them that “the quest for justice is no sprint. It’s a marathon relay (where we must) pass the baton to the next generation of freedom fighters.”
Bullard, who counts the legendary civil rights leader and social science pioneer W.E.B Du Bois as his hero, said it’s critical that young advocates learn how to use research and science to support their crusade for justice. When underserved and marginalized communities are armed with evidence and facts, the weight of their protest is enhanced, he adds. “We have always been taking research we produced and translating it into action that communities can own and take to whatever venue – the city council, the state legislature, congress, the presidency – to change things.”
An international issue
The United States isn’t the only country suffering from inequality, said Bullard, who sees the United Nations as a standard-bearer in the effort to address social ills, like poverty.
“The United Nations is in the position to talk about and implement the moral imperative to start dealing with some of these huge disparities in health and wealth – to redress and correct inequities and structural disparities,” he said. “Globalization has made the world a much smaller place. We are starting to see how we are all connected and how we have to together deal with the stressors coming down the road.”
In according Bullard the Lifetime Achievement award, United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen paid tribute to someone she called an ally of the environmental movement, hailing his vision, his commitment and his role in mentoring the environmental justice advocates of tomorrow.
“Robert Bullard has shown us how one person can mobilize others to build a movement for the planet and for social justice,” she said. “His commitment to the idea that all people, regardless of background, have a right to clean air and clean water reflects a human-rights based approach to the environment, which is critical for global discourse. UNEP is honoured to recognize this pioneer with our highest possible award.”
Bullard says the biggest reward is the people around him, for whom the struggle – and the small victories – are real.
“There is a long arc of justice, and we have to understand that this is not instant oatmeal. If we get you all to understand that these struggles are long term, we will reach that North Star: justice, fairness and equity for all.”
The United Nations Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth and the Young Champions of the Earth honour individuals, groups and organizations whose actions have a transformative impact on the environment.
The annual Champions of the Earth award is the UN’s highest environmental honour. It recognizes outstanding leaders from government, civil society and the private sector. Professor Robert Bullard is one of six laureates announced in December 2020, on the cusp of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030.
By showcasing news of the significant work being done on the environmental frontlines, the Champions of the Earth awards aim to inspire and motivate more people to act for nature. The awards are part of UNEP’s #ForNature campaign to rally momentum for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) in Kunming in May 2021, and catalyze climate action all the way to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November 2021.
