Ako Amadi is addressing the perennial problem of acute water shortages during the dry season in Nigeria by developing a cost effective and simple rainwater harvesting system for use in poor rural and semi-urban communities.
Sachidanand Bharati, a key Chipko activist and environmental crusader, is organizing women into groups of green police, the Mahila Mangal Dals, to create and manage "forests of water" in the drought hit Himalayas. His water management system combines traditional methods found throughout India with new, homegrown techniques and aims to halt the famine and degradation of forest lands in the...
As government recognizes it cannot possibly fulfill its pledge of affordable housing without going bankrupt first, Andrea Bolnick is demonstrating a new approach to providing “dwellings with dignity” to South Africa’s most vulnerable. Through active community engagement, she is able to firmly place slum dwellers in the driver’s seat and bring about badly needed renovations to their shacks. In...
In Lima, one of the world’s driest urban areas, growing numbers of low-income neighborhoods have no access to running water. Juan Carlos is proposing a new approach to sustainable waste management. His system can be installed at one-third the cost of traditional water and waste systems, it saves 50 percent of typical urban water consumption, and most importantly, it involves local citizens in...
Gustavo Candia protects Paraguay's wetlands ecosystems by mobilizing citizen sector organizations to change harmful cultivation methods, offer environment-friendly jobs, and design new land use policies. By creating a bilateral environmental protection strategy, he works with institutions in other countries to jointly manage ecosystems across boundaries.
Srinivas Chary Vedala is reforming how water is delivered in Indian cities, with the goal of improving poor people’s access to potable water. He is working on the technical aspects of water systems as well as how public officials manage their work.
Rajendra Dahal is systematically exposing mismanagement and corruption in Nepal's hydropower, an industry that has the potential to be one of the country's greatest economic assets. He is also spearheading the process of organizing citizens and journalists to influence the way decisions are made in the hydropower industry.
Ajaya Dixit is a practical engineer working to bring safe drinking water within easy reach of Nepal's poor families, initially by conserving the rainwater falling during the monsoons on each household's roof. He is also bringing together other practical workers concerned with intelligent water resource management.
Marta Echavarría has created a model for establishing water markets among traditionally non-cooperating upstream and downstream users, across public and private lines, which finance sustainable watershed management and conservation.
Haidar El Ali has created the Oceanium, a working center in Senegal for the protection of ocean and underwater resources. Haidar's approach is to advocate the sustainable management of fishing resources through the creation of several marine parks that ensure the protection of species and resources through biological rest.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Roberto Epple became one of the major actors of a campaign to preserve the River Loire, the last wild river in Europe, causing the French government to abdicate and preventing the constructing a series of large dams along its course. Based on this successful experience, Roberto created a “River Parliament”—a European network of local and national citizen...
Sameh Ghali is introducing a new system of community participation in the design of low-cost, community-appropriate sewage systems in Egypt's villages to improve public health, quality of life, and the environment.
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