Washington: Kamal Bawa,
an Indian-born professor of biology at the University of
Massachusetts Boston, is the 2012 winner of the Gunnerus
Sustainability Award, the world's first major international award
for work on sustainability.
Bawa will receive the Gunnerus Gold Medal and the award of 1
million Norwegian Kronor (about $190,000) at a ceremony in
Trondheim, Norway, the university said citing a Royal Norwegian
Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS) announcement.
Bawa, also a faculty fellow at the Centre for Governance and
Sustainability, home of the Global Environmental Governance
Project, is known for his research on population biology in
rainforest areas. His span of work includes biological discoveries
made in Central America, the Western Ghats, and the Himalayas in
India.
He is also noted for founding, and serving as president, of the
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE),
a non-profit conservation and development research think tank in
Bangalore.
"I am very pleased over the recognition that our work has
received," Bawa was quoted as saying in an interview with a
Norwegian newspaper.
"In January, 2011, a University of Pennsylvania study ranked ATREE
#19 among the environmental think tanks in the world, and
implicitly #1 in Asia, and now the Gunnerus Award--I am
naturallyvery happy."
Until recently, Bawa held the Ruffolo Giorgio Fellowship in
Sustainability Science and Bullard Fellowship at Harvard
University.
The Gunnerus award is the first major international prize for
outstanding scientific work that promotes sustainable development
globally, and will be awarded every two years.
The award is named after DKNVS' founder, Bishop Johan Ernst
Gunnerus (1718-1773), and is the result of collaboration between
DKNVS, Sparebank1, SMN, and the society Technoport.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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