In September 2019, the UN Environment Programme will honour Champions of the Earth, outstanding environmental leaders from the public and private sectors, and from civil society who have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. Here we meet previous winners of this prestigious award and find out how they still are making a difference in their communities and across the globe.
When 20-year-old Boyan Slat accepted the United Nations Champion of the Earth award in 2014 for his efforts to clear the ocean of plastic, he made two predictions: that the road ahead would be bumpy and that he would not give up.
Five years later, both those forecasts have come true: Slat is as committed as ever to clearing plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch using a revolutionary U-shape floater that acts like an artificial coastline. But he has certainly hit those bumps he foresaw.
Despite setbacks and criticism, Slat has no intention of giving up, not least because he believes his project, The Ocean Cleanup, is part of a tide of innovation that could deliver solutions to the world’s most intractable environmental problems.
“I’m a strong believer that action inspires action, so creating examples of how we solve the problem by using the best humanity has to offer—our ingenuity, our ability to create things out of the blue and our ability to collaborate and effectively work together—that’s what the world needs,” he said.
“Too often people working on environmental issues can be negative… Rather than rally against the things we don’t agree with, we should embrace the better angels of our nature and use them to solve these problems.”
It all started for Slat when he was a high school student and went on a scuba diving trip to Greece. Appalled by how much plastic he found in the water, he decided to work on a solution. Since then, his initial concepts have matured, he has founded The Ocean Cleanup project and raised millions of dollars to fund his revolutionary work. His Twitter profile puts it succinctly: Studied aerospace engineering, becomes a cleaner.
It’s been a roller-coaster few years and that’s before you consider what’s been going on miles out to sea in the world’s largest gyre, or floating garbage patch.
Slat and his team took their first cleanup array, System 001—a 600-metre floater that sits on the surface with a tapered three-metre-deep screen that hangs down and prevents plastic from floating away—to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in September 2018, but there were issues. The system failed to retain the plastic because it was not moving at a consistent speed. Then, in January, it had to be taken back to port for repairs.
A second iteration called System 001/B, which Slat hopes will address these problems, has now been launched and is being put through its paces at the enormous marine dump between Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.
Marine scientists and others have taken aim at Slat’s project, saying it is distracting attention from efforts to curb plastic use, and will never work.
Slat argues that although efforts to encourage people not to use so much plastic are critical, we must also deal with the plastic already poisoning fish, birds and other marine creatures. Some critics are locked in a kind of status quo bias, he says.
“If you accept that logic, you might as well ask if we should stop cleaning the streets because that’s only encouraging people to pollute,” he said. “Seeing people working hard to clean up what’s out there can send an inspiring message that draws people’s attention and inspires others to also do something about the problem.”
Every year, at least eight million tonnes of plastic leak into our oceans—the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic every minute. In 2017, the UN Environment Programme launched its Clean Seas campaign to inspire governments, businesses and people to take action.
Slat’s dedication to the cause is rooted in his character, his passion for solving complex puzzles and a keen sense of responsibility.
“I do think I’m a little stubborn: when I start something, I want to see it through and make it happen. Ninety-nine per cent of the time when something fails it’s because people give up too early. I’m quite persistent,” he said.
He is hopeful that the team solved System 001/B’s speed issue but there is still a problem with plastic slipping into what he calls The Twilight Zone, the space between the screen and the floater. He calls this overtopping.
“We need to resolve the overtopping to have something you can deploy in the ocean and leave for months, and it safely retains the plastic for that period of time,” he said, noting candidly that other problems could also rear their heads.
“You never really know when you’ve reached proven concept because there might be unknown unknowns that we haven’t discovered yet. If it’s really just the overtopping, I’m confident we will be able to solve that in the coming months, but the question is whether that’s the only thing between us now and having proven technology,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, Slat believes technology will be critical to building a more sustainable future but whereas in the past the focus was on human well-being, now technology must be harnessed for the survival of the planet. And it will need to find novel ways to encourage people to do whatever it takes to sustain the systems that support life.
“Rather than everyone voluntarily becoming vegan, the solution will be fake and artificial meat. Rather than people voluntarily trying to give up flying, it will be zero emission aircraft technology, rather than nobody using cars, it’s going to be electric cars,” he said.
“We are starting to see a young generation that gets that and is excited about a future like that, but the question still comes down to: are we going fast enough and how much damage will have been done before we get there?”
True to this vision, Slat’s own champions of the earth include Bertrand Piccard, a solar aviation pioneer and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, as well as people who work in clean energy.
Slat relishes technical challenges—that’s part of the attraction of The Ocean Cleanup project—but beyond that he is motivated by his love for nature, especially the ocean.
“Being underwater is the closest you can get to being an astronaut,” he said. “I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to scuba dive and not come across plastic. That’s really the dream.”
In September 2019, the UN Environment Programme will honour Champions of the Earth, outstanding environmental leaders from the public and private sectors, and from civil society who have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. Here we meet previous winners of this prestigious award and find out how they still are making a difference in their communities and across the globe.
Joan Carling struggles to find the right words to convey how she feels about the fires raging across the Amazon, the world’s biggest rainforest and a vital piece in the complex ecological puzzle that sustains life on earth.
“It really… it just makes me angry,” the renowned indigenous rights activist said.
Carling, a member of the Kankanaey tribe in the Philippines, has spent more than two decades fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples and it distresses her to see what is happening to people who have long sought to protect nature in the Amazon.
“Even if the numbers are low, they are the ones who protect the Amazon,” she said. “It gives you a sense of helplessness.”
Carling has worked tirelessly to ensure the voices of some of the world’s most marginalized and isolated people are heard. In 2018, she received the UN Environment Programme’s Champion of the Earth lifetime achievement award, which she dedicated to her fellow activists across the world.
“A lot of activists, especially in the Philippines, saw the award as an affirmation that we are doing the right thing,” she said. “The champions of the earth for me are the indigenous peoples in the Amazon, who are standing their ground… It’s the indigenous peoples in the United States and around the world, standing their ground, (and) the faceless people who are struggling to protect the environment for humanity.”
Carling is well aware of the price to be paid for such selfless action. In February 2018, her name was added to a government list designating her a terrorist. She was taken off the list in January this year but the official harassment has continued.
Carling has now joined with other indigenous activists and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to plan a global campaign to fight against the killing and criminalization of indigenous rights activists and environmental defenders.
More than three defenders were killed across the world every week in 2018, according to the latest report by Global Witness. The latest death toll highlights the ongoing dangers facing those who are defending their environmental and human rights in the mining, logging, and farming sectors as well as other extractive industries.
Despite these dire figures, Carling sees hopeful signs that the voices of indigenous peoples are increasingly being heard, while their pivotal role as stewards of nature is being recognized, as for example in this year’s landmark Global Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
A summary of the report, released in May, said that nature is declining at unprecedented rates, with one million species at risk of extinction and the foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life being eroded. But with transformative change nature can be conserved, restored and used sustainably, it said, noting that indigenous peoples and local communities must be involved.
The assessment was based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources and also drew on indigenous and local knowledge.
Among its extensive findings, it noted that at least a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, used or occupied by indigenous peoples, and that nature managed by indigenous peoples and local communities, while under increasing pressure, is generally declining less rapidly than other lands.
The report concluded that regional and global scenarios would benefit from an explicit consideration of the views, perspectives and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also said in a report this year that indigenous peoples have a clear role to play in fighting climate change, provided that their land rights are legally recognized and protected.
“That puts us at the centre of the global debate to find solutions for climate change,” said Carling, who is a member and co-convener of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group for Sustainable Development. But she knows the forces aligned against indigenous peoples are formidable.
“When we assert the land rights of indigenous peoples it doesn’t sit well with vested economic and political interests. We need to strengthen the global movement of people coming together against this kind of unaccountable power,” she said, citing the example of the student movement inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.
The mobilization of youth gives Carling hope but she worries that some global leaders are still dragging their feet, and time is running out.
“Every person on earth is now feeling the impact of climate change and if we continue with the present economic paradigm we will not survive the next 50 years,” she said.
“Leaders must... listen to indigenous peoples now and understand our perspective and how we value mother nature, not in economic terms but for the whole well-being of humanity and the environment. If we are just given the space and listened to, we can shift the direction of where we are going,” she said.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres agrees that decision makers need to do more. Ahead of a pivotal Climate Action Summit on 23 September 2019, he urged global leaders to step up to deal with a “dramatic climate emergency”, saying the world has the tools but political will is lacking.
Carling, who has attended some preparatory meetings for the Summit, hopes to see some urgent changes.
“Nobody is really standing up and saying, ‘this is the moment for us to act together in the spirit of global solidarity and action’. They are still confined to their own national interests. We need to go beyond that because climate change knows no borders, so actions should also be global.”
As some populist leaders, who some feel are showing too little interest in mitigating climate change, rise to power in several countries, Carling says it is time for citizens to tackle the growing divides by starting a dialogue and seeking to understand the other’s fears and concerns.
Change will eventually have to come from the bottom up and take account of the views of indigenous peoples and marginalized groups, Carling says. Decision-making on climate solutions should include those who are heavily affected and transform global economic and political power so it is accountable to the people.
Carling has helped set up the Right Energy Partnership with Indigenous Peoples that aims to ensure that renewable energy projects are fully aligned with the respect and protection of human rights, and provide at least 50 million indigenous peoples with access to renewable energy by 2030.
“A lot of renewable energy, like wind farms and solar farms, are in indigenous territories. However, the energy is not for us... It’s business as usual in terms of land grabbing, lack of equitable benefit-sharing and violation of people’s rights. Indigenous peoples fully support the just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and this should be in line with the protection of human rights and the principles of equity and justice,” she said.
At the heart of Carling’s belief system is the certainty that the people on the ground must be front-and-centre in the race against destructive climate change. And not because it is ethically correct to do so, but because they have the solutions.
“We are not just vulnerable groups; we are actors, contributors and agents of change… If world leaders listen to us, acknowledge the contributions we make, protect our lands and respect our rights, we can go a long way.”
This certainty that the solutions are there for the taking gives Carling hope.
“For me, there is no space to be pessimistic. I always try to see the bright side of things because otherwise, who will take action? That is the spirit of activism. We just have to persist and strengthen our movements for a better world.”
In September 2019, the UN Environment Programme will honour Champions of the Earth, outstanding environmental leaders from the public and private sectors, and from civil society who have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. Here we meet previous winners of this prestigious award and find out how they still are making a difference in their communities and across the globe.
Leyla Acaroglu traces her passion for disruptive design to twin epiphanies in her late teens: the realization that her survival was intrinsically linked to the health of the planet and the simultaneous conviction that she was incredibly privileged to be able to do something about that life-changing appreciation.
“I was really surprised that nobody had told me that everything is interconnected, including me. Every second of every day, I rely on the planet to survive and my health and well-being is directly linked to the natural environment,” the Australian said.
Just as she grasped her place in the natural ecosystem, another epiphany struck.
“I was pen pals with a young female refugee in one of the detention centres in Australia. She was my age and she had fled Iran and wanted to study. I was very moved by the reality of my freedom and her lack of freedom… It became very obvious to me that as a young female who was fortunate enough to grow up in Australia, I was able to agentize myself… and commit to something that was going to have a bigger impact than just my immediate needs.”
And so she did. Today, Acaroglu is a self-proclaimed “positive disruptor”, an educator, a designer, a social scientist and a powerful advocate for a new world order where the take-make-dispose logic of the linear global economy will be replaced with a circular and regenerative model.
In 2016, Acaroglu won the UN Environment Programme’s Champion of the Earth award for science and innovation for her work to bring about positive environmental and social change through innovation.
“Winning the award really helped establish some of the work I’ve been doing as a professional ‘positive disruptor’ and allows more people to see that there are different ways to engage with the big problems we face,” she said.
Among her many projects, Acaroglu devised the Disruptive Design Method to promote circularity in all aspects of product and service creation. She creates educational programmes on circularity, advises businesses on sustainability and has bought a farm in Portugal to regenerate and restore.
Through it all, she has held onto the empathy that inspired her younger self.
“A lot of the reason I do sustainability is because of the entrenched poverty and lack of opportunity faced by so many people,” she said. “I could never undo that experience of realizing that I had a voice to speak for other people… For every one of me, there are 10,000 potential mes that don’t have that opportunity.”
Acaroglu’s multifaceted expertise and boundless enthusiasm for sustainable living are exactly the qualities expected to be on display at a pivotal Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September 2019.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged world leaders, businesses and civil society to come to the summit with concrete ideas of how they will cut emissions by 45 per cent in the next decade and achieve net zero emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. What is required is a full transformation of global economies.
This is Acaroglu’s philosophy in a nutshell. But she recognizes that the status quo is a powerful force that can limit leaders’ potential to tackle problems effectively.
“It is important that we give people—at all levels of decision-making and power—the opportunity to change their minds, to think differently, to experience what it could be like if we do not just reinforce the status quo of diplomacy and of business,” she said.
One of the most pervasive and persistent examples of the status quo is the linear nature of the global economy.
“The linear production model is an addictive model and so nearly every business, even the ones that want to transfer to a circular economy, are addicted to a linear model of selling consumers goods designed for landfill,” she said, noting that a global reconditioning of business is required to turn this notion on its head.
It is an enormous ask but there are signs of progress with more dynamic leaders coming forward and daring to disrupt traditional ways of doing business.
Acaroglu cites recycling firm TerraCycle’s Loop system, a global shopping and reuse platform, as a positive movement towards a fully circular production system, and says many small and medium-sized enterprises are seriously committing to circularity. She is also delighted to see more design agencies seeking her advice on providing circular economy services to their clients.
This shift is partly the result of consumers demanding more sustainable products and services. Acaroglu is working with the UN Environment Programme on a sustainability lifestyle project called Anatomy of Action that aims to show that each individual can be part of the solution by making informed, deliberate choices about how they live and what they consume. This is one of many initiatives being undertaken across the UN System of funds, programmes and agencies as part of a larger social mobilization campaign called #ActNow. Over 170,000 actions have been logged on the ActNow platform. The activities raise awareness, ambition, and action on climate and hope to accelerate implementation of the Paris Agreement and sustainable living overall.
Acaroglu is passionate about the need to equip young people with the cognitive and creative tools necessary to take a leap into an alternative future. In 2014, she founded The UnSchool of Disruptive Design—a global experimental knowledge laboratory for creative rebels and change agents. If Acaroglu’s work inspires these budding innovators, they also galvanize her.
“The UnSchool and the work I do with these people who are coming to learn how to change in the world, is the biggest optimism shot I could get any day of the week,” she said.
In her bid to rework education, Acaroglu has designed a circular economy curriculum—the Circular Classroom—for Finland and is working on another for Southeast Asia. She is also a passionate advocate for disrupting the gender-based stereotypes of leadership. This thinking reflects calls by the United Nations for women to be included as key decision makers in the critical transformation needed to tackle climate change.
“The gender debate is not one-sided,” Acaroglu said. “What we need is for women to be given more space to show leadership and men to be given more space to be emotionally mature and intelligent. It’s a big problem and I would love to see it tackled because it directly affects our ability to solve problems.”
Her own environmental champions include Afroz Shah, the Indian lawyer behind the world’s biggest beach clean-up in Mumbai and a fellow Champion of the Earth, and designer Ron Finley, the ‘gangsta gardener’ on a mission to bring urban gardening to South Los Angeles and beyond.
For Acaroglu, leadership through action is key but inspiring others to step up becomes more difficult when the prevailing narrative is one of despair. This idea that our climate crisis is too profound and too complex to address is sapping the energy of younger generations, Acaroglu says. Yet again education and understanding are key. Learning to hope may be the most important lesson of all.
“When you understand that the world is this dynamic, interconnected, chaotic mess of opportunity and challenges, then you are equipped with the tools to see that you can turn challenges into something else. That resilience, the ability to be flexible in the mind and see the future as being different to the present, that’s something we need to make sure all of our young people have,” she said.
“Now is the time to take all of that technology and all of that power and that collaboration and figure out how to be a force that is giving back to the planet that created us rather than continually extracting. That’s the challenge of my lifetime and I hope to inspire future generations to be able to take on that challenge.”
A corporate titan with an unconventional agenda; the food specialists who looked outside the (takeaway) box; the ocean explorer whose name has become synonymous with conservation: these are just some of the environmental heroes who have dedicated their lives to bringing their audacious visions of a better world to life.
These pioneers are all previous winners of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth award—the world’s flagship environmental honour—and their actions have inspired others to join them in their fight for a cleaner, fairer and more sustainable world.
As the countdown begins to the announcement of this year’s Champions of the Earth, and ahead of a pivotal Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September 2019, the energy and vision demonstrated by previous Champions are needed more than ever as the world races to decisively cut carbon emissions before the worst effects of global warming become inevitable.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres wants world leaders, businesses and civil society to come to the Summit with concrete plans to cut emissions by 45 per cent in the next decade and achieve net zero emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
What is required is nothing less than a complete transformation of economies and societies. In short, it’s a job for heroes.
Thankfully, we already have model citizens to lead us forward. The Champions of the Earth have shown year after year that real change is possible if individuals commit to overhaul the way they live so that we safeguard the planet’s resources and ensure our own survival.
Here we look at five Champions of the Earth who transformed their own worlds.
The trailblazing tycoon: Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever
2015 laureate for entrepreneurial vision
During more than a decade as Chief Executive Officer of consumer goods giant Unilever, Paul Polman always dared to do things differently. Long before “sustainability” became a buzzword, he sought to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation and increase Unilever’s positive social impact.
Since stepping down last year, Polman has continued his work to put sustainability at the heart of global business. He is chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce and recently co-founded the Imagine foundation to help eradicate poverty and stem climate change by helping companies pursue the Sustainable Development Goals. He announced the news on Twitter, quoting the lyrics of the John Lennon song: “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.”
Polman would like to see “heroic Chief Executive Officers” drive a shift to a low-carbon, more inclusive way of doing business. This call chimes perfectly with one of the six priorities laid out by Guterres for the Climate Action Summit—mobilizing public and private sources of finance to drive decarbonization of all priority sectors and advance resilience.
The Summit’s ambitious agenda finds an echo in Polman’s heart: tweeting out Guterres’ call for urgent action at the meeting, he wrote: “With extreme heat getting worse, nature is telling us what we already know: there’s no time to waste against climate change.”
The food mavericks: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods
2018 laureates for science and innovation
The role of agriculture in the production of greenhouse gases has led to mounting calls for people to move towards a more plant-based diet. But how can you get hungry, red meat-loving consumers to shift?
The entrepreneurial founders of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, who won the Champions of the Earth award for creating sustainable alternatives to beef burgers, took up that challenge with gusto.
Beyond Meat worked with top scientists to strip down the core components of meat and extract them from plants instead, using ingredients like peas, beetroot, coconut oil and potato starch.
Impossible Foods took a slightly different tack to arrive at a similar result. Chief Executive Officer Patrick O. Brown’s team discovered an iron-containing molecule that occurs naturally in every cell of every animal and plant and that is responsible for the unique flavours and aromas of meat. They used this knowledge to produce a meatless burger.
The two companies have tapped into a growing demand, especially among younger consumers, for products that are good for both planet and people, proving that it makes good business sense to harness this hunger for products that don’t cost the earth.
Their can-do attitude is exactly what’s needed on a global scale to tackle our climate crisis.
As Patrick O. Brown says: “There are huge global problems, but they are solvable and we’re going to solve them. Just wait.”
The Son of the Desert: Wang Wenbiao, Chairman of Elion Resources Group
2017 laureate for lifetime achievement
When Wang Wenbiao bought the Hangjinqi Saltworks in the middle of the Kubuqi desert in Inner Mongolia in 1988, he embarked on an adventure that would see him rise to the top of the country’s largest private green industries enterprise, Elion Resources Group.
His journey began, as most interesting journeys do, with a problem—how to make the saltworks profitable when the creeping desert was swallowing the salt lake, damaging equipment and making it difficult to transport the salt to market?
Wang, who grew up in Kubuqi, partnered with local communities and the Beijing government to fight the advancing sands and give hope to some of the 70,000 people who had been struggling to survive. In doing so, he showed how private industry could contribute to the fight against climate change and environmental degradation, while still turning a profit.
Wang set up a special fund to pay for afforestation and assigned a third of his staff to plant trees around the lake. He also encouraged local people to grow licorice, a hardy plant that grows well in deserts and is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. Elion provided locals with seeds, training and other support, and also bought the harvest at a fair price.
Today, around two thirds of the desert has been greened and Wang, who is known as the Son of the Desert, says he is in it for the long haul.
“Greening the deserts is like a marathon, as long as there is a desert, my marathon will not come to an end,” he said.
The Dutch dreamer: Boyan Slat
2014 laureate for inspiration and action
Dutch inventor Boyan Slat was only 19 when he won the Champion of the Earth award for inspiration and action but he was already a young man on a mission: to clean the seas of plastic waste using a revolutionary floating boom.
Since then, Slat has brought his vision to life with The Ocean Cleanup project and although his team was forced to bring the first prototype back to port, they have now returned to sea, hoping to scoop up some of the trillions of pieces of plastic that are choking our fish, killing marine wildlife, damaging coral reefs and turning beaches into rubbish dumps.
Slat’s ongoing passion for the project reflects growing public concern. In 2017, the UN Environment Programme launched its Clean Seas campaign to inspire governments, businesses and people to take action, including cleaning beaches, cutting plastic use and investing more in recycling facilities.
Slat’s original System 001—a 600-metre-long U-shaped floater with a tapered three-metre-deep skirt attached below to trap the plastic—was launched in September 2018 and towed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gigantic swell of rubbish twice the size of France.
But The Ocean Cleanup team found that the floater was failing to hold onto the plastic. They tried to modify the design at sea, but were eventually forced to tow the system back to port after it suffered a fatigue fracture.
More tests and modifications were needed but in August, Slat said System 001/B had arrived at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“We move forward cautiously knowing we may be presented with more unscheduled learning opportunities… Yet it is safe to say that we are closer than ever to having a tool capable of cleaning up these garbage patches for good,” he wrote on The Ocean Cleanup website.
Her Deepness: Sylvia Earle
2014 laureate for lifetime leadership
A renowned pioneer of deep sea exploration and a distinguished marine biologist, Sylvia Earle has dedicated her life to exploring and protecting the oceans. Her philosophy is simple: “We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.”
Earle, 83, 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. Her list of laudatory titles is impressive: she has been called Her Deepness, a Living Legend, a Hero for the Planet, and the Face of Marine Biology.
Earle was the first woman to serve as the Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, since 1998, she has been Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.
She is also the founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research Inc and the Sylvia Earle Alliance as well as being the leader of the National Geographic Society Sustainable Seas Expeditions.
In 2009, she founded Mission Blue, a global alliance to ignite public support for the protection of a network of Hope Spots—special places that are vital to the health of the ocean. The alliance aims to bring about a significant increase in ocean protection by 2020.
In 2014, she was awarded the Champions of the Earth prize for lifetime leadership. And that works goes on. Earle is still travelling the world, seeking to inspire others with her passion to preserve our seas.
The black mamba is the most venomous snake in sub-Saharan Africa. One bite can kill a person in just a few hours. It is also the namesake of the all-female anti-poaching unit that operates in the 56,000-acre private Balule Nature Reserve at Kruger National Park in South Africa.
The name choice represents “the strength of the mambas, and their quick reactions,” said Valeria van der Westhuizen, communications manager for the Mambas. “Strength of the woman in South Africa, strength of the Mamba.”
The Black Mambas were founded in 2013 and comprise of 14 women largely from the Phalaborwa community that resides near the park. Prior to the group’s formation, poaching for rhino horn and bushmeat in the reserve was rampant, with poachers—many who came from the local communities—fetching up to US$26,000 for one horn. Leitah Mkhabela, the supervisor Mamba, said that a reason for the nearby communities’ involvement was that they didn’t feel the wildlife belonged to them, as most had never had a chance to even see the animals. Poaching was a way to make a lot of money, quickly.
This is why one of the Mambas’ mandates is to educate on the importance of conservation as well as gather information from locals about poachers.
“The community needs to benefit from the reserves that are near,” said Mkhabela, highlighting a wider ongoing discussion across Africa on protected areas. “If the game reserves can benefit the local communities by providing freshwater sources or giving bursaries for higher education, we are going to see a decrease in rhino and bushmeat poaching.”
Through the Bush Babies Environmental Education Program, the Mambas take members, especially children, from the communities to the reserve to see the wild animals. “There are some people who live just 10 km from the reserve, but have never seen a rhino, lion or elephant in their life,” said Mkhabela.
Aside from educating the local communities, the Black Mambas track 126 km of the park’s border every day, looking for snare traps, inspecting the electric border fence and searching cars. Their work has reduced poaching in the reserve by 75 per cent.
“In 2013 when this project started, we used to come back from sweeps with 80 fresh snares,” said Mkhabela. “Today if we sweep the whole area we might come back with just five, some of which are old.”
Cecilia Njenga, head of UN Environment Programme South Africa said that the Black Mambas highlighted the importance and effectiveness of local knowledge and commitment, crucial to combatting the illegal wildlife trade.
“The Black Mambas are an inspiration not only locally, but across the world to all those working to eliminate the scourge of the illegal wildlife trade,” said Njenga. “We recognize the rapid and impressive impact they have made, and the courage required to accomplish it.”
While the rewards of protecting wild animals is unparalleled, Mkhabela says the job isn’t for everyone. With salaries being minimal, at roughly US$224 per month, living conditions rough, and the dangers from poachers always present, it takes guts to be a ranger.
“I have to put my life at risk every day, making sure that South Africa’s iconic wildlife is safe,” said Mkhabela.
For example, in 2017, Mkhabela and two other Mambas were staging an ambush in Balule when three poachers, whom they were pursuing, spotted them due to a full moon that evening. The women—who patrol unarmed—were lucky enough to escape unscathed after finding a blown-out section of the park’s electric fence, which an elephant had brought down earlier that day.
But for Mkhabela the risks are worth it. She says that being women and mothers, the Mambas understand what it means to care and protect.
“We need to speak for the animals because if we don't speak for them, nobody will speak for them. We have to fight for them, because if we don't fight for them, there's nobody that will fight for them. We know what love is,” she said.
In 2015, the Black Mambas were bestowed with UN Environment’s Champion of the Earth lifetime achievement award. Since winning, Mkhabela says that the anti-poaching unit has received even more admiration from the communities than previously, and this has given the Mambas confidence in the value of what they are doing.
Mkhabela says that there are another 10 women currently in training to become Mambas and she hopes the project will grow further and receive more funding.
“I'd like to see many more girls from the community getting jobs as rangers,” she said. “We need the Black Mambas project to continue. We cannot let the poachers win.”
World Ranger Day, an initiative of the International Ranger Federation, is on 31 July to celebrate the work rangers do to protect the planet’s biodiversity and commemorate those killed in the line of duty.
Through collective action, environmental protection can be achieved. This is what the Kalinga indigenous people in the Philippines demonstrated to the world when they stopped the famous Chico River Dam Project from being constructed, and it is what inspired Joan Carling to make her lifelong mission fighting for human rights in land development.
“In the very principles that indigenous people carry it says that we must retain our reciprocal relations with Mother Nature,” says Carling who is from the Kankanaey tribe in the Philippines. “That reciprocal relationship is the one that I believe is being undermined by the western concept of development.”
Carling, 55, began her career as an activist more than twenty years ago in Cordillera, a northern region of the Philippines. The area, which is home to 1.3 million indigenous people, sits on the country’s mineral belt—rich in gold, copper and manganese.
The country’s Mining Act of 1995 allowed transnational corporations total control of the mineral-rich lands including full water and timber rights and even the permission to evict communities from approved areas.
So Carling, along with others from the Cordillera People's Alliance, began to gather information on the impact of mining as evidence to use to petition the government. She says that the reason why the alliance was able to stop some of the planned projects from happening, is because of the evident impacts on the natural environment, such as the polluting chemicals in rivers. After a unity pact was signed by elders from all provinces to oppose mining companies, a provincial governor also vowed a no-entry policy on mining operations in his district.
“It became clear that unless people on the ground took action, politicians would not be held accountable,” Carling said.
Carling—like her indigenous predecessors—has also spoken out against dam building. While she acknowledges that many people see dams as a renewable source of energy, she says that not only have they destroyed many river ecosystems around the world, they have also led to human displacement.
A recent study by the University of Sussex and the International School of Management in Germany found that countries that rely on large hydropower dams for their electricity suffer higher levels of poverty, corruption and debt compared to other nations.
“It’s become clear that there is a bias for dams because there is a huge profit generated by dam builders, a huge opportunity for corrupt officials to put money in their pockets. That profit is driving the dam business, more than responding to needs,” she said.
Still, many developing countries consider dam construction as an expressway ticket to economic development. Carling knows this, and that’s why she has not outright advocated for a ban on dam projects, but “a human rights-based approach to energy development”.
“Indigenous peoples are not the enemies. We are not against development,” she said. “But one of the strongest recommendations by the World Commission on Dams is for countries to do an options assessment in relation to energy needs. There are different options, it's not only dams.”
That is why Carling is exploring new territory: partnerships with the private sector. She hopes that by collaborating with environmental champions in business, they can help show sustainable development is possible.
Carling was bestowed with UN Environment’s Champion of the Earth lifetime achievement award in 2018.
Leyla Acaroglu was 19 years old when, sitting in her first design lecture, she heard something that would change the way she saw the world forever.
Her design professor was giving a lecture on the Gaia hypothesis: the theory that everything in nature is interconnected. As designers, he underlined, they would probably one day make a creative decision that would have far-reaching environmental impacts that they wouldn't even know about.
“I sat there looking at this picture of a tsunami and thinking ‘What! Why didn’t anybody tell me this? Why is this the first time I’m learning about this?’,” said Acaroglu.
“I just couldn’t reconcile that experience,” she said. So, Acaroglu decided to make it her life goal to work in sustainable design and help people create better products and services that would lessen their environmental footprint.
Today, Acaroglu is a UN Environment Champion of the Earth for her efforts in spreading sustainable design solutions. She passionately believes that we are in the midst of a major cultural shift towards the circular economy, simply because there are no other options for our planet.
“Changing the way we do things is a design challenge. Design is not just the act of creating a really comfortable chair, design is the act of taking any resource and forming it into something new,” she said. “We're setting ourselves up for failure unless we figure out how to circularize the system.”
Acaroglu, who is 36-years-old and the founder of two design studios— one of which focuses on learning experiences to support companies’ transition to a circular economy— says that most business structures that a government allows to be created are designed to be “very rigid and linear.”
“We don't have policies that support these hybrid social innovation models. There's only a couple countries in the world that allow that to happen,” she said.
Her philosophy is that rather than just selling a product, which is the consumer’s responsibility to discard at the end of its life, companies should design products that are modular, recyclable and economically viable to recondition and reuse, from the beginning.
Acaroglu says one effective tool to assess a product’s impact on the environment is life cycle assessment, as it looks at the impact of activities in the economy across the entire supply chain.
Apart from training companies, she also created thecircularclassroom.com to help students think from a young age about products having a circular rather than linear lifecycle. She designed a curriculum for Finland and is currently building an entire learning system for Thailand, which will be delivered outside of the main school system.
“Our siloed approach to education is not equipping young people with the tools that they would need to bring about the new economy that we are going into,” she said.
A self-described fan of Buckminster Fuller—the eccentric futurist who became famous in the 1950s for his invention of the geodesic dome—Acaroglu said what she admires the most about Fuller was his ability to infect people with ideas about the future and how to change the world.
“We live in magic,” she said. “There is no other known lifeforce in this universe. And we have the power to destroy or create within that magic.”
Champions of the Earth, the United Nations’ highest environmental honour, celebrates outstanding figures from the public and private sectors, and from civil society whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. If that is someone you know, nominate them to be our next Champion.
When Izabella Teixeira told her parents that she was going to work on environmental issues in the early 1980s, they were noticeably upset.
“They didn't know what it meant, they didn't think I could survive financially from it,” Teixeira said. “It wasn’t something people outside of science understood.”
But the former environment minister of Brazil, and current co-chair of the International Resource Panel, ignored her family’s concerns and accepted a job at the Secretariat of the Environment in the State of Pará (SEMA)—the precursor to the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama)—to work under the renowned environmentalist Paulo Nogueira Neto.
“At the time it was very painful to go against my family,” she recounts.
Teixeira, who is today a UN Champion of the Earth for her policy leadership that spans 30 years, admits that the most valuable lesson that she learned for environmental protection is the importance of dialogue.
“I understood from Nogueira Neto that if you are looking for a solution you need to dialogue not only with those in your tribe, not only those converted, but with everyone,” she said.
That is why Teixeira has spent most of her civil service life placing different players together, from private business to indigenous non-governmental organizations. The efforts have paid off, sprouting into remarkable feats, such as the reversal of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest from an annual loss of 27,772 km2 in 2004 to 4,571 km2 in 2012. Her policies regarding land use also resulted in the creation of 250,000 km2 of conservation areas, or the equivalent of 75 per cent of the global forest safeguarded.
When Teixeira eventually became vice-minister for the environment, her mother came and congratulated her for having a vision that many people, including herself, only realized was important 30 years later.
Today, Teixeira is still fighting for the sustainable use of resources as well as trying to encourage political engagement in biodiversity conservation. And while these are tremendous tasks, she is optimistic that they will materialize, particularly because of the young people’s mindset.
“My generation grew up with the obligation to understand what pollution and environmental degradation means,” said Teixeira. “For this generation, protecting the environment is the default, it is part of their core values.”
The International Resource Panel co-chair says she is continually impressed by how young people package environmental protection into every part of their lives, such as not accepting jobs with companies whose values are not aligned with theirs.
“For my generation that would never happen,” she said.
Today’s generation understands that prioritizing the environment in policymaking is not only about protecting nature, it is ensuring that people lead better lives, that the economy thrives and that the planet remains healthy for future people, Teixeira emphasized.
Brazil’s present government has a new vision about how the country’s natural resources should be managed, which is largely based on giving states more power. Nevertheless, Teixeira says the public keeps environmental protection front and centre, demonstrated by the fact that the Bolsonaro government rescinded from pulling out of the Paris Agreement, despite the pledge he had made on his presidential campaign.
Teixeira was awarded the Champion of the Earth title in 2013. Six years later, she is still defending the planet doggedly.
“We as human kind can make the difference in a positive way by learning from our experiences,” she said. “I think being a Champion of the Earth means more than hope. It means acting to change based on the future.”
Champions of the Earth, the United Nations’ highest environmental honour, celebrates outstanding figures from the public and private sectors, and from civil society whose actions have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. If that is someone you know, nominate them to be our next Champion.
The city of Hangzhou in eastern China was once described by the Italian explorer Marco Polo as the, “finest and most splendid city in the world”. Today it is once again on the map thanks to a range of initiatives to cut air pollution and increase the livability of the city.
Indeed, many cities across China have suffered from the effects of air pollution. To remedy the situation, China introduced an Air Pollution Action Plan in 2013 to reduce dangerous particulate matter (PM) 2.5 levels.
For the city of Beijing, the solution has been to drastically eliminate the use of coal: the city closed its coal-fired power stations and banned people in surrounding areas from burning coal for heat. The city’s efforts were so effective that, while in 2013, Beijing ranked as the 40th worst city for PM 2.5 by the World Health Organization, it ranked in 187th place in 2018. As part of nationwide efforts to curb air pollutants, other cities in China followed suit and dramatically reduced their PM 2.5 levels.
The new 2018-2020 Three-year Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky War, announced in July 2018, is the successor of the original air pollution action plan. It calls for a reduction of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide by more than 15 per cent compared with 2015 levels by 2020.
Hangzhou’s bike-sharing success
The bustling city of Hangzhou, home to nearly 10 million people, is world-famous for being home to the high-tech industry, including the world's leading e-commerce group, Alibaba.
However, like other cities in China, Hangzhou has had to tackle the scourge of air pollution. Since most of the Hangzhou’s PM 2.5 pollution comes from vehicle emissions, Hangzhou city authority started China’s very first public bike-sharing scheme. Launched in 2008, the primary purpose of this initiative was to a provide a convenient public service for short journeys in the city. They ended up with two knock-on benefits: less traffic and a reduction in air pollution.
In 2017, when the number of bikes hit a peak, a total of 10 companies, including commercial ones, operated more than 882,000 bikes. The number of bike trips is estimated in the range of hundreds of millions since 2008.
Furthermore, the integration of the public bike-sharing scheme with other public transport in the city has increased its attractiveness and ease-of-use. “This healthy transport has made our city better and its air quality is good,” says Tao Xuejun, general manager of the Hangzhou Public Bicycle Service.
China was known as the “Kingdom of the bicycle” in the 1980s. With economic progress, many people moved to motorized forms of transport. The re-emergence of the bicycle in Hangzhou since 2008 may have been somewhat unexpected but its contribution to helping reduced air pollution is undeniable.
In 2017, the Hangzhou bike-sharing scheme won an award from the Ashden charity which said that “the combination of convenient and free bicycles, well separated bicycle lanes and good public transport appears to have led to reduced use of cars and their associated congestion, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions”.
“Hangzhou is a great example of how cities can introduce initiatives like bike sharing to encourage people to get out of their cars and reduce air pollution,” says Rob de Jong, Head of UN Environment's Air Quality and Mobility Unit. “We really need to encourage city governments and planners around the world to design cities for people, and not cars - leading to safer and cleaner living spaces”.
Switching to non-polluting vehicles an international priority
Tackling air pollution by removing cars from the road is the focus of UN Environment’s Share the Road Programme. The Programme is centered around the concept that everyone begins and ends their journeys as pedestrians, and in cities, some people rely almost exclusively on walking and cycling. Yet, investors and governments continue to prioritize road space for cars. To make the switch to more eco-friendly means of transport, UN Environment supports governments and other stakeholders in developing countries to systematically prioritize and invest in infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.
Bike-sharing schemes have not been without criticism, however. As the number of bicycles grew rapidly across China, many found their way to massive dumps, as companies went bankrupt because of insufficient demand. Vast piles of impounded, abandoned or broken bicycles have become a familiar sight in many big cities.
Hangzhou itself has had to cut the number of bikes. Cities around the world are learning from this example and ensuring they have full control over the number of bikes released into the city within their bike-sharing schemes.
Other initiatives in Hangzhou to reduce air pollution
Conscious of the risk air pollution poses to health, Hangzhou has implemented many other measures to improve air quality. It expanded its metro system to reduce traffic and invested in thousands of electric buses and taxis.
The city also developed an innovative battery-swapping mechanism for the its electric taxi fleet, allowing one electric taxi to travel for 230 kilometers on two to three fully charged batteries every day. Hangzhou’s goal is to reach a total fleet of 1,000 electric taxis, ultimately aiming at a zero-emission taxi fleet.
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