environment prize

Clean Up the World founder awarded richest environment prize

CLEAN Up the World campaign founder lan Kieman has been awarded the world’s richest environmental prize by the United Nations in New York. Kieman, whose annual clean up initiative started in Sydney in 1989, with Clean Up Australia, and now mobilis es more than 40 million people in 120 countries, received the US$2OO,OOO (A 5321,000) 1998 Sasakawa Environment Prize. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) prize was presented at a dinner mid-November.

“The prize has been awarded to Mr Kieman for communicating in the most visible way and to the world at large, the need to protect the environment,” Lord Stanley Clinton-Davis, the UNEP selection committee’s acting chairman said. Kieman decided to organise a mass clean up of Sydney Harbour in 1989 after being horri fied by the amount of pollution he saw while representing Australia in the 1986/87 solo around-the-world yacht race.

Australians quickly embraced the concept with more than half a million turning out every year on Australia Day to clean up thousands of waterways and pollution trou bled spots around the nation.

The concept was expanded in 1993 with a Clean Up the World campaign attracting tens of thousands of volunteers over three days in September. Kieman, now 58, was declared Australian of the Year in 1994 and awarded the Order of Australia medal in 1995. “Who would have thought that in the six short years since he launched the Clean Up the World that he would have captured the imagination of so many and single-handedly done so much to arrest

environmental degradation,” Lord Clinton- Davis said in a statement released in New York. The Sasakawa Prize, awarded since 1984, is amongst the world’s most presti gious international environmental hon ours with past winners including Brazilian rainforest cam

paigner Chico Mendes and World Watch Institute director Lester Brown whose writ ing alerted the world to threats to the biosphere.

An international panel met in September to decide the recipient of this year’s prize.

“Clean Up the World is a remark able achievement in which significant contributions have been made to the health of our planet by communities working together simple but effec tive,” UNEP’s executive director Klaus Toepfer said.

“The results of the campaign in terms of direct improvement to the living standards and behaviour of partic ipating communi

ties are immeasurable. “It is a concrete example of how environmental issues are most effectively handled with the involvement of individuals at the local level”.

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