When Desmond Alugnoa and Jacob Attakpah stepped onto a celebrity-studded green carpet at the Earthshot Prize awards in Cape Town last week, they had a good feeling. “Not if we win,” said Attakpah, a project manager for the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), which is working to change waste management practices in Ghana, “when we win.” Soon after, he and GAYO co-founder Alugnoa walked onto the stage as one of five winners to receive 1 million pounds ($1.2 million) to accelerate and scale up the impact of their work. The Earthshot Prize supports selected people and organisations that work to improve environmental problems. From thousands of nominated applicants, 1 million- pound prizes are awarded to five winners in five categories: protecting and restoring nature, cleaning air, reviving oceans, reducing waste, fixing the climate. Fifty winners will be awarded over 10 years. Over and above the prize money, an additional $90 million to protect African landscapes was also announced. This year, 15 finalists — from Kazakhstan, Cost Rica, Ecuador, Nepal, Australia, France, Kenya, the U.K., Indonesia, Uganda and the United States — traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for the award ceremony Nov. 7. It was the culmination of a week of events that saw Table Mountain lit up in green and the city’s mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, symbolically reintroducing the locally extinct Cape water lily (Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea) to the False Bay Nature Reserve, a Ramsar site and wetland of international importance that is threatened by contamination from the city’s sewage…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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