Congratulations to the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners!
Each year, the Goldman Prize honors grassroots environmental activists and their work to safeguard the environment and communities facing disproportionate climate impacts.
We’re thrilled to see Global Greengrants Fund grantee partners on the list this year, including Chima Williams of Nigeria, and Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez of the Indigenous Cofán community in Ecuador.
For over 50 years, Royal Dutch Shell has recklessly spilled millions of gallons of oil in the Niger Delta. In the aftermath of recent oil spills, and building on years of work by climate and human rights movements in Nigeria, environmental lawyer Chima Williams organized with local communities to hold Shell accountable for the years of damage it’s done to the Niger Delta and the communities who live there.
Thanks to the efforts of Williams and his team, a Dutch court ruled in January 2021 that Shell was both responsible for recent oil spills and had an obligation to prevent the spills. The court victory was a rare moment of accountability for a transnational company over the actions of its subsidiaries, and opened the door for further legal action from local communities in Nigeria.
Global Greengrants funded the work of Chima Williams and his team through grants in 2013 and 2014 to Green Alliance of Nigeria and Frontline Africa (Uhuru Spirit), as part of our support to grassroots associations and small NGOs throughout the Niger Delta since 2004. This victory is a step in the pursuit of justice for those impacted by the capitalist greed of corporations like Shell, and is the result of local communities’ efforts to propose solutions to protect and clean up the Niger Delta for over 60 years.
Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez
Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez are part of the Cofán, a community indigenous to Ecuador whose ancestral territory covers more than 1,500 square miles of rainforests, wetlands, glacial lagoons, and snowcapped mountains.
In 2018, Lucitante and Narvaez’s leadership among local communities lead to a legal victory that cancelled 52 illegal gold mining concessions, which were granted without the consent of the Cofán, whose land the mines would have been built on. The legal victory protected 79,000 acres of rainforest, as well as the Aguarico River, and arose thanks to years of work from many members of the Cofán.
Global Greengrants has given several grants to the Cofán in Ecuador to support their movement building, including to the Centro Cofán Sinangoe in 2018 to support the forest patrol called La Guardia that Narvaez helped form. Through our grantmaking, we acknowledge and support the rights of Indigenous communities to free, prior, and informed consent to development on their lands and their right to protect their territory. This not only shifts global power into the hands of Indigenous communities, but helps slow the climate crisis—Indigenous communities globally protect more than 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity, and innumerable trees that offset global carbon emissions.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
We are honored to support such bold grassroots activists who are defending their local environments and pushing back against extractive industries. We are even more honored to support the movements on whose shoulders leaders like these stand—because it’s that collective work, in addition to the work of individual leaders, that will uproot the systems that underpin the climate crisis and help us create a more just and sustainable world.
Photo credit: Goldman Environmental Prize