Ethiopia and Slovakia share UNESCO prize: 17-10-2007
Ethiopia and Slovakia have jointly won this year's Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation.
The director general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, presented the award to the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation in Ethiopia and Dr Julius Oszlanyi of Slovakia for efforts towards conservation.
Results were decided by the Bureau of the International Coordinating Council of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme, after a two-day consultation in Paris at the end of September.
The Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC) was founded in 1976 and has catalogued the countries forests, aquatic resources and medicinal plants several times since then, enabling it to identify 20 key areas where rich biodiversity demands conservation.
It helped to set up Community Gene Banks for hundreds of crops in order to sustain food supplies and the banks have distributed over 80,000 seed samples for research.
Meanwhile Dr Julius Oszlanyi, who is the director of the Institute of Landscape Ecology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, was recognised for his contribution to ecological research programmes, notably in forest biodiversity conservation and biosphere reserves.
His input helped to create conservation strategies for key habitats and species which needed protecting in Slovakia and the rest of Europe.
The biannual Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation pays out US$30,000 to winners.
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