The world's leading green energy prize announced that eight sustainable energy pioneers from the African continent, India and Pakistan have been selected as finalists for the prestigious Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy 2011. The finalists will compete for over £ 120,000 cash prize. The winners will be announced at a ceremony to be hosted in London on 16 June 2011.
The Aga Khan Planning and Building Service, Pakistan's (AKPBS,P) innovative programme BACIP (Building and Construction Improvement Programme) has been selected as one of the finalists for the Ashden Awards 2011. BACIP is providing families in remote mountain villages with access to affordable, energy efficient technologies, which insulate their homes, heat their water and reduce their consumption of fuel wood. The programme tackles deforestation and climate change by saving 100,000 tonnes of wood a year and preventing emissions of around 160,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. AKPBS,P aims to extend this approach to other Himalayan countries, which face similar challenges and reach another 17,000 homes by 2014.
Access to affordable clean energy is fundamental to daily life and should be a basic right yet almost a quarter of the world's population - over 1.4 billion people - live without access to electricity, and world-wide around 2.5 billion people still rely on wood and charcoal for cooking. Harnessing clean, local and affordable ways to meet the energy needs of the poor and to drive local industry is vital to any efforts to reduce poverty and to tackle the urgent issues of climate change and deforestation.
The 2011 Ashden Award finalists provide policy-makers, businesses and communities across the globe with pioneering real-life examples of how this can be done through the use of local clean energy technologies combined with clever marketing strategies. From the production of biomass pellets from crop waste to replace coal in India to the provision of a range of solar-powered products to off-grid communities in Africa, these finalists prove that it is possible to meet the energy needs of the poor in a way that radically improves lives, drives economic growth, cuts CO2 emissions and saves trees.
Since 2001 Ashden Award winners have improved the lives of 23 million people world-wide and together are saving over three million tonnes of CO2 a year - this years' international finalists alone have saved over half a million tonnes of C02, equivalent to the CO2 emissions of 90,000 UK homes. And it does not stop there: all award finalists have ambitious plans to step up their efforts and to continue in their drive to cut carbon emissions and improve lives.-PR
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