Bangladeshi NGO Tahzingdong has won the Energy Globe Award in Earth category at COP22 this year for its community-based forest conservation project in Rowangchhari, Bandarban
The award was declared on Thursday at COP22 in Marrakech, Morocco.
The two other finalists for the award are the Inga Foundation of Honduras for its project named “Land for Life” and AMSED of Morocco for its project named “Waste water treatment for agricultural use with minimal Greenhouse Gaz Emission in Asselda Village.”
The Energy Globe Award was founded in 1999 by the Austrian energy pioneer Wolfgang Neumann and is one of the most prestigious environmental awards till date.
The goal of the award is to present successful sustainable projects to a broad audience as many of today’s environmental problems already have good, feasible solutions.
Projects which conserve and protect resources or that employ renewable energy can participate.
With a global call for participation, Energy Globe invites outstanding sustainable best practice projects to participate in the annual competition. From all over the world, some 800 projects and initiatives are submitted annually to compete for the award.
With the goal of restoration and conservation of the community managed forest resources in the Bandarban hill district of Bangladesh, Tahzingdong has been implementing its project supported by Arannayk Foundation of Bangladesh since 2009.
The project covers 12,919.64 hectares of nine community conserved areas which are commonly called village common forests, and it includes more than 1,000 indigenous forest-dependent families.
Tahzingdong has built two community houses as part of institutional capacity building and installed two water supply technologies that capture more than 387,000 litres of clean water in a month from the forests using a gravitational flow system, said Aung Shwe Shing, executive director of Tahzingdong.