WINNERS OF THE GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE 2006

The 2006 Goldman Prize recipients tackled some of the most pressing environmental issues of the day: stopping illegal logging, halting blatant violations of international environmental agreements, protecting local communities from dangerous and toxic incineration plans and protecting the livelihoods of entire communities threatened by dams. All of them, through grassroots efforts, helped educate and motivate local communities to get involved in the effort to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

Press Release

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Group Photos

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Ceremony Photos

This year’s winners are:

North America
Craig E. Williams, 58, Berea, Kentucky, United States:
Williams convinced the Pentagon to stop plans to incinerate old chemical weapons stockpiled around the United States and has built a nationwide grassroots coalition to lobby for safe disposal solutions. Williams co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its international campaign to ban landmines.

Africa
Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor, 36, Monrovia, Liberia:
Siakor exposed evidence that former Liberia President Charles Taylor used profits of unchecked, rampant logging to pay the costs of a brutal 14-year war. Such evidence – collected at great personal risk to Siakor – led the United Nations Security Council to ban the export of Liberian timber, part of wider trade sanctions that remain in place today.

Asia
Yu Xiaogang, 55, Kunming, China:
Yu spent years creating groundbreaking watershed management programs while researching and documenting the socioeconomic impact of dams on Chinese communities. His reports are considered a primary reason that the central government paid additional restitution to villagers displaced by existing dams and now considers social impact assessments for major dam developments.

South & Central America
Tarcísio Feitosa da Silva, 35, Altamira, Brazil:
Feitosa led efforts to create the world’s largest area of protected tropical forest regions in a remote, lawless region in northern Brazil threatened by illegal logging. Despite death threats, Feitosa worked with local organizations to create protected lands for local residents and exposed illegal logging activities to the Brazilian government.

Europe
Olya Melen, 26, Lviv, Ukraine:
Melen, a lawyer, used legal channels to temporarily halt construction of a massive canal that would have cut through the heart of the Danube Delta, one of the world’s most valuable wetlands. For her efforts, she was denounced by the notoriously corrupt and lawless pre-Orange Revolution government.

Islands & Island Nations
Anne Kajir, 32, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea:
Kajir uncovered evidence of widespread corruption and complicity in the Papua New Guinea government, which allowed rampant, illegal logging that is destroying the largest remaining intact block of tropical forest in the Asia Pacific region. In 1997, her first year practicing law, Kajir successfully defended a precedent-setting appeal in the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea that forced the logging interests to pay damages to indigenous land owners.