Goldman Environmental Prize [Latest Winners 2023]

Alessandra Korap, who is an Amazon indigenous woman, won the Goldman environmental prize for 2023. In this context, know more about the Goldman Environmental Prize, and about the winners of this year’s award, for the UPSC Prelims.

Goldman Environmental Prize

The Goldman Environmental Prize honours the grassroots activists involved in protecting the environment and promoting sustainability.

• The Prize recognizes individuals who even take risks to protect and enhance the natural environment through sustained and significant efforts. 
• By recognizing the individual grassroots leaders, the Prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.
• The award was instituted in 1989 by the Goldman Environmental Foundation.
• The prize recognizes grassroots environmental heroes from roughly the world’s six inhabited continental regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands & Island Nations, North America, and South & Central America.

Goldman Environmental Prize 2023 Winners

• Alessandra Korap
  • Alessandra Korap was born in an Indigenous village located in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and her village was facing threats from the encroachment of non-indigenous outsiders.
  • The nearby highways also facilitated the influx of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers who started to encroach on the region’s vast indigenous territories.
  • The influx of outsiders posed a grave threat to Ms. Korap’s Munduruku people, who spread over Tapajos River Basin, in Para and Mato Grosso states. 
  • Soon various issues emerged in the form of illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railway and river ports which put severe pressure on their lands.
  • Ms. Korap and other Munduruku women overturned the traditional custom of all-male leadership to take responsibility for defending their territories.
  • They organized their communities and held demonstrations and also presented evidence of environmental crime to federal police and the federal attorney general.
  • This act of bravery was recognized by the Goldman Environmental Prize and studies have shown that indigenous-controlled forests are the best preserved in the Brazilian Amazon.
  • The intensity of destruction has resulted in the eastern Amazon near Munduruku no longer being a carbon sink.
  • The new government of Brazil has created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and also carried out operations to evict miners.
• Tero Mustonen
  • A professor and environmental activist from Finland who led the purchase of peatland damaged due to industrial activity sponsored by the state.
• Delima Silalahi
  • A Batak woman from north Sumatra in Indonesia who organized indigenous communities across the country to fight for their rights.
• Chilekwa Mumba
  • A Zambia community organizer who won compensation for residents harmed due to copper mining before the UK supreme court.
• Zafer Kizilkaya
  • A marine conservationist from Turkey who established the country’s first community-managed marine protected area in the Mediterranean.
• Diane Wilson
  • A shrimp boat captain from the US who won a case against Formosa Plastics over the discharge of plastic waste on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Goldman Environmental Prize:- Download PDF Here