María Gabanes, from Ecuador, has been named as the co-winner of the 2011 Young Environmental Leader Award during the UNEP-Bayer Young Environmental Envoy Programme, held in Leverkusen, Germany. She is tackling one of the most urgent environmental problems in the world: the contamination of water with mercury caused by hydraulic gold mining.
Her project offers a smart approach to this problem by using natural resources —plants and algae— to filter the contaminated water. The Young Environmental Leader Award honors unique environmental projects that demonstrate originality, potential impact and sustainability. The award ceremony was held on the final day of the UNEP-Bayer Young Environmental Envoy Programme, which brought together 47 young environmental leaders from 18 developing countries.
The envoys had been selected from some 800 applicants to take part in the environmental study tour in Germany, which focused on waste management, forests, renewable energy and other issues. Each Young Environmental Envoy is involved in a sustainable development project in his or her home country. María Gabanes shares her award with three other envoys from Indonesia, Kenya and the Philippines.
The other winning projects included a household biogas initiative, an environmental education scheme for disabled children and a project to replace firewood and charcoal used as cooking fuel in households with briquettes made from dried foliage and waste paper.
The four winners of the Young Environmental Leader Award receive project support worth a total of EUR 3,000 and further support in their home countries to make their projects environmentally and economically sustainable. An independent panel of judges from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), an NGO and Bayer selected the four winners.
Launched in 1998, the UNEP-Bayer Young Environmental Envoy Programme aims to improve knowledge of environmental issues among young people and support them in developing and implementing projects on sustainable development, conservation and other aspects of the environment in their own communities. Some 11,200 young people have applied for a place on the programme and around 500 envoys have been selected to travel to Germany.
The Young Environmental Envoy Programme now covers 18 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Venezuela and Vietnam. Many former envoys now have jobs where they play a key role in environmental protection in their home countries.
Through an alumni network on Facebook, envoys past and present can stay connected and exchange ideas and experiences on environmental protection with other green innovators around the world.
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