Blog Action Day announces 'water' as this year's topic

Early this morning, Blog Action Day announced that the topic for October 15 is 'water'. (Last year it was climate change; the year before it was poverty.) The Ashden Awards blog is one of nearly 800 blogs that have signed up to write about water that Friday.

Blog Action Day brings together bloggers from around the world to post about the same issue on the same day "with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action".

Last year 13,606 bloggers from 156 countries joined in the conversation about climate change.

We'll be blogging news on October 15 about Ashden Awards winners, such as: IDEI, CRELUZ, Practical Action and AIDFI (currently nominated for World Challenge award).

As Mary Robinson said in New York last week: "Water is the oil of the 21st century and waste is the gold." Maybe waste will be next year's topic.

From 2009: We've signed up, have you? and Svati Bhogle, from TIDE, a 2008 Ashden Award winner, writes on last year's Blog Action Day about "the efficient use of energy, use as different from abuse in the developed world and misuse in the developing world."

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Sunlabob and Practical Action win UNEP Sasakawa prize

Two of the 2007 Ashden Award winners, Sunlabob and Practical Action, have been awarded the 2008 Sasakawa prize by the United Nations Environment Programme.

From the UNEP press release:

The UNEP Sasakawa prize, worth $200,000, is awarded yearly to individuals or institutions who have made a substantial contribution to the protection and management of the environment. The winners, who will each receive $100,000, were chosen by a five-member jury from a shortlist of six projects at a meeting in Tokyo.

The Prize acts as an incentive for grassroots environmental efforts that are sustainable and replicable. It recognizes extraordinary initiatives from around the world that make use of innovation and groundbreaking research and ideas and empower people at the local level.

This year's theme for the award was 'Moving towards a low carbon economy', the theme of World Environment Day 2008. The shortlist included four other outstanding projects bringing clean energy to thousands of people, from families in the Philippines to rural households in South India and prisons in Rwanda.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said: "Addressing the monumental energy challenge of the 21st century involves practical projects at ground level that bring tangible changes to the way people live. Sunlabob and Practical Action are showing tremendous leadership in bringing clean energy to remote communities in Peru and Lao PDR, and in doing so they are setting further examples of the energy alternatives available to the developing but also the developed world."

Click here to read more about the Sasakawa Prize

Click here to read more about the Ashden Awards

Click here to read the rest of this post.