2012-09-27 15:31:09

Nepalese campaigner awarded forestry prize


(Vatican Radio)The inaugural Collaborative Partnership on Forests Wangari Maathai Award was presented Thursday to one of the main architects of the community forestry movement in Nepal.
Dr Narayan Kaji Shrestha was given the Award at a ceremony at the UN Food and Agriculture Headquarters in Rome, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to forests.

The award was established this year to honour the life and work of the late Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maathai, a campaigner on forest issues worldwide.

Lydia O’Kane went to FAO Headquarters to meet Dr Shrestha and ask him what it means to receive this award.

“I feel very happy and also feel that by getting this award I’m again under pressure to do something on the community forestry movement. Wangari Maathai was a leader and she was an inspiration for me also in the community forest process and movement, she was doing in Kenya and I was doing in Nepal”
What Dr Shrestha has succeeded in doing in Nepal is to bring the community into the forestry management process. It is a initiative, he says which has brought results. “It became obvious, it’s the women, cow herders, these kind of people need to be given authority and power to make the decision and they have to be made the managers”.

The Collaborative Partnership on Forests is made up of 14 member organizations who work together to promote best practice in forestry. Listen to Lydia O’Kane’s interview with Narayan Kaji Shrestha RealAudioMP3








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