Local wins international environmental award

US$150 000 International Goldman Environmental Prize Award for 2011.
Other winners are Hilton Kelly of United States of America, Prigi Arisandi of Indonesia, Ursula Sladek of Germany, Dmitry Lisitsyn of Russia and Francisco Pineda of El Salvador. The Goldman Environmental Prize, now in its 22nd year, is awarded annually to grassroots environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions and is the largest award of its kind with an individual cash prize of US$150 000.
The winners were awarded the prize at a ceremony held yesterday afternoon at the San Francisco Opera House and will also be honoured at a smaller ceremony tomorrow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
Richard N Goldman, one of the founders of the Goldman Environmental Prize, passed away at the age of 90 in November 2010.
To honour his memory, the 2011 Prize events will be dedicated to him. Zimbabwe’s winner Raoul du Toit co-ordinated conservation initiatives that helped develop and maintain the largest remaining black rhino populations in the country.
He began working on rhino conservation as a Programme Officer for the IUCN African Elephant and Rhino Specialist Group in 1985.
He established the Lowveld Rhino Conservancy Project in 1990.
By 2009, WWF funding declined and additional funding options were required to maintain the five-fold increase in the Lowveld rhino population, hence he set up the Lowveld Rhino Trust as an independent, stakeholder-based body to completely subsume the former Rhino Conservancy Project.
He became the director of the LRT, which has a small staff of four other professionals and 20 rhino monitors (including some of the foremost rhino tracking expertise in Africa and has deployed some of these men on missions to Zambia, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Rwanda, Zambia, DRC and Mozambique).
The LRT does all the management work (rhino translocations, etc) in the large Lowveld conservancies.
This trust receives funding from various donors, primarily via the International Rhino Foundation with a proportion of our budget still provided by WWF.
The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1989 by late San Francisco civic leaders and philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman.
It has been awarded to 145 people from 80 countries.
Prize winners are selected by an international jury from confidential nominations submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organisations and individuals.
Previous Prize winners have been at the centre of some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges, including seeking justice for victims of environmental disasters at Love Canal and Bhopal, India; leading the fight for dolphin-safe tuna and fighting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.