Dec 4, 2009, 16:36 GMT
Stockholm - Climate change and illegal rainforest logging were highlighted Friday at an awards gala in the Swedish parliament for winners of the 2009 Right Livelihood Awards, often called the alternative Nobel Prize.
'We are facing a global climate destabilization, risking all achievements of human civilization: our culture, cities, institutions,' said Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, who created the awards in 1980.
'Only political engagement can overcome the blockages built by the coal and oil lobbies, the profiteers of deforestation and the arms race,' von Uexkull said in his speech.
David Suzuki of Canada, who won an honorary award for promoting the 'socially responsible use of science' and raising awareness about climate change, expressed doubts about what would be achieved at the upcoming UN conference in the Danish capital Copenhagen.
'Vested interest groups - the fossil fuel and auto sectors - and a few dissident petro-states like Canada, will attempt to water down any hard targets,' Suzuki said.
Three other winners - Alyn Ware of New Zealand, Rene Ngongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Australian-born physician Catherine Hamlin - each received 50,000 euros (73,000 dollars).
Ware was honoured for his role in drafting peace study guidelines that became part of the school curriculum in New Zealand, as well as campaigning against nuclear weapons. In 2002, he co-founded the organization Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND).
Ngongo has worked to protect the rainforests of Congo against illegal logging and mining. At the ceremony, he spoke on the importance of the world's second largest rainforest - after the Amazon - in sequestering carbon, thereby slowing climate change.
Hamlin was unable to travel to Stockholm for medical reasons, but was honoured in absentia for 50 years of work to treat complications linked to childbirth in Ethiopia.
The awards, for which 82 candidates from 46 countries were nominated this year, are not connected to the Nobel Prizes endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.
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