Skip to content
Menu
REDD-Monitor
  • Start here
  • About REDD-Monitor
  • REDD: An introduction
  • Contact
REDD-Monitor

Global Witness wins TED and Skoll Foundation awards

Posted on 6 March 201419 December 2014
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

Yesterday Global Witness won two prestigious awards: the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the TED Prize.

The Skoll Foundation gave the award in recognition of “the organisation’s extraordinary innovation in disrupting an unjust and unsustainable status quo” and TED gave the award because of Global Witness’ “bold and creative vision to spark global change”.

The awards are together worth $2.25 million. It’s a nice birthday present for Global Witness, which is in its 20th anniversary year.

I met Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley in the early 1990s when they were researching their first trip to Cambodia. They came to Oxford where I was working with a team of people on rainforest campaigns. I was obsessed with Vietnam and one of my colleagues was obsessed with Cambodia. Back in the days before the internet, we’d collected several filing cabinets of information, including one drawer labelled “Cambodia”.

Simon and Patrick spent a couple of days working through the files. I remember them getting very excited when they read that the Tonlé Sap, the tributary of the Mekong that flows through Phnom Penh, changes its direction of flow twice a year.

A year or so later, I met them again in Bangkok. I was on my way to Vietnam to work in a tree nursery. Simon and Patrick were there posing as timber buyers and using a hidden camera to film their meetings with a company called Display Tech. One of Display Tech’s directors told them, “I pay both sides, from the Khmer Rouge, mostly the wood it belongs to the Khmer Rouge.” I was amazed by Simon and Patrick’s courage as well as their determination to uncover corruption and environmental crimes.

Since then, Global Witness has continued to uncover illegal logging and corruption in the forestry sector. The organisation has expanded into a campaign aimed at combating “blood diamonds”, and has launched an oil and corruption campaign. The recognition from the Skoll Foundation and TED is thoroughly well deserved. Congratulations to Charmian, Patrick and Simon and all at Global Witness!

Here’s Charmian Gooch’s 2013 TED talk – the transcript (with detailed foot notes) is available on the TED website – and the video has been watched more than one million times:

Corruption is not just something that happens “over there”, as Charmian points out:

“So many of these scandals are hidden in plain sight — they’re down the road in the City of London. They’re in our company boardrooms. They’re in the corridors of power we walk past every day. What we need to do is piece these things together, expose the links and then we can start to break them.”

 

Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

Related

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

SUBSCRIBE!

Enter your email address to receive notification of new posts.

Recent themes
Natural Climate Solutions
WWF's conservation scandals
Aviation and offsetting
Conservation Watch

REDDisms

“CDM is a work in progress.”

— Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, February 2011

Recent Posts

  • Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • How REDD greenwashes Glencore’s coal mining operations in Colombia
  • The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading
  • Book review: “Forest Conservation and Sustainability in Indonesia” by Bernice Maxton-Lee
  • Plant for the Planet: Felix Finkbeiner’s fake forests

Recent Comments

  • st john on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow
  • Gordon Emery on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Jonathan Price (@B3CPres) on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Mrs Linda Knight on Savraj Gata-Aura sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the Bar Works investment scam
  • Chris Lang on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow

Issues and Organisations

AB 32 Boiler rooms Bonn California Can REDD save ... ? Carbon accounting Carbon Credits Carbon Offsets CDM Conservation-Watch Conservation International COP21 Paris Deforestation FCPF FERN Financing REDD Forest definition Fossil fuels FPP Friends of the Earth FSC Greenpeace Guest post ICAO Illegal logging Indigenous Peoples Natural Climate Solutions NGO statements Plantations Poznan R-M interview REDD and rights REDD in the news Risk RSPO-Watch Safeguards Sengwer Sustainable Forest Management The Nature Conservancy Ulu Masen UN-REDD UNFCCC World Bank WRM WWF

Countries

Australia Bolivia Brazil Cambodia Cameroon Canada China Colombia Congo Basin region DR Congo Ecuador El Salvador European Union France Germany Guatemala Guyana Honduras India Indonesia Kenya Laos Luxembourg Madagascar Malaysia Mexico Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Republic of Congo Sweden Tanzania Thailand Uganda UK Uncategorized United Arab Emirates USA Vietnam West Papua
©2021 REDD-Monitor | Powered by WordPress and Superb Themes!