Laureates from Slovakia and Ethiopia receive 2007 Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation

The Director-General of UNESCO, Koďchiro Matsuura, has awarded the 2007 Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation jointly to the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (Ethiopia) and to Dr Julius Oszlányi (Slovakia), in accordance with the recommendations of the Bureau of the International Coordinating Council of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme, which met in Paris 18 to 20 September.

The Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC) is recognized for its efforts to establish effective systems ensuring the conservation and sustainable use of Ethiopia’s biodiversity, as well as to provide for equitable sharing of the costs and benefits derived from them. Since its founding in 1976, the IBC has conducted several surveys and inventories of forest and aquatic resources as well as medicinal plants. This work made it possible to identify 20 areas of rich biodiversity for conservation purposes. The IBC has also helped set up Community Gene Banks for hundreds of crop varieties critical for food security, including wheat, sorghum and millet. In all, nearly 80,000 seed samples have been distributed from the bank’s reserves for research purposes.

Dr Julius Oszlányi is the Director of the Institute of Landscape Ecology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He has made valuable contributions to interdisciplinary ecological research programmes, notably in forest biodiversity conservation and biosphere reserves. He has provided important input to efforts to formulate conservation and management policies for habitats and species of high conservation value in Slovakia and in Europe at large. Within MAB, Dr Oszlányi has been a diligent promoter of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves. Notable in this context were his efforts to promote the creation in 1998 of the first tri-lateral biosphere reserve, East Carpathians, shared by Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. Since 2001, Dr Oszlányi has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency.

The US$.30,000 Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation, made possible through a donation from His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al-Said of Oman, aims to acknowledge outstanding contributions to the management or preservation of the environment. The prize is awarded every two years.

• Author(s):Press Release N°2007-123
• Source:UNESCOPRESS
• 17-10-2007