Ashok Khosla Wins UNEP's Environment Prize

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, October 31, 2002

Ashok Khosla Wins UNEP's Environment Prize

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Dr Ashok Khosla, one of the world's great environmental thinkers and innovators, has won this year's Sasakawa Environment Prize of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the UN environment agency announced here Wednesday.

The prize, worth 200,000 US dollars and considered one of the most prestigious environmental awards in the world, will be presented at the American Folk Art Museum in New York on 19 November 2002.

Ashok Khosla has worked tirelessly to demonstrate both the theory and practice of "sustainable development" through his teaching and fostering of environment-friendly and commercially viable technologies, said UNEP in a statement.

These range from village power plants which use agricultural wastes as fuel to mini factories that recycle paper and local enterprises that make low cost roofing tiles.

Much of his recent work has been achieved through Development Alternatives, a group of organizations headquartered in New Delhi which he founded in 1983, to help bring people and nature directly into the design and implementation of his nation's development strategies.

In 1972, Khosla became the founding director of the government of India's Office of Environmental Planning and Coordination, the first national environmental agency in a developing country.

Over the next five years, he pioneered the design and implementation of the basic systems and structures needed to integrate the environment into the development process of a developing economy and to set and meet national environmental goals.

In 1983, Khosla founded the Development Alternatives (DA), a group of organizations whose mission is to help make national development strategies in India become more environmentally and socially sustainable.

The UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize, sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and founded by the late Ryoichi Sasakawa, has been awarded annually since 1984 to individuals who have made outstanding global contributions to the management and protection of the environment.

Past winners include Nobel laureate, Professor Mario J. Molina for discovering a new reaction sequence involving chlorine peroxide, which accounts for most of the ozone destruction in the Antarctic.

They also include Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper from Brazil who died leading the fight against cattle ranchers' destruction of the rainforest.

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