The 'Global – 500' Award is given for rare achievement in which of the following fields ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, environment conservation. The Global 500 Roll of Honour was instituted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1987 to recognise outstanding environmental achievement by individuals and by organisations, in an adult category and a youth category. Over its sixteen-year life more than 719 laureates were named before UNEP discontinued the award in 2003 and replaced it, from 2005, with Champions of the Earth — today the UN's highest environmental honour. The roll of laureates makes the field unmistakable: the marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the primatologist Jane Goodall, the broadcaster David Attenborough, the Kenyan Green Belt Movement founder Wangari Maathai (later a Nobel Peace laureate), the Brazilian rainforest activist Chico Mendes and the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. India's best-known recipient is Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, honoured in 1987 — the award's very first year; Sreekumar Krishnan Nair was recognised in 1999. Every one of these citations is for the protection of nature and the environment, not for any of the narrower fields the other options name.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Far too narrow. Conservation of genes and germplasm is one specialised corner of conservation science, and it is recognised through entirely different channels — the Convention on Biological Diversity's access-and-benefit-sharing architecture internationally, and awards under India's Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority domestically. The Global 500 citation was for environmental achievement in the round: forests, oceans, wildlife, activism, environmental journalism and education.  (c) Wrong United Nations agency altogether. Population work is the mandate of the United Nations Population Fund, which confers its own separate United Nations Population Award; the Global 500 belonged to UNEP, the UN's environmental authority created after the 1972 Stockholm Conference.  (d) The most tempting near-miss, and the one most candidates settle on after ruling out the first two. Pollution abatement is genuinely part of environmental work and some Global 500 laureates did exactly that — but it is a subset, not the field. The award's remit spanned habitat and species conservation, forests, rivers and oceans, environmental education and grassroots activism. When an option and a broader option are both defensible, the exam wants the one that matches the award's own stated scope, which is environmental achievement.

Concept: UNEP — the United Nations Environment Programme — was set up in 1972 in the wake of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and is headquartered at Nairobi, Kenya, making it the first major UN body based in a developing country. Alongside its assessment work (the Global Environment Outlook, the Emissions Gap Report, the Frontiers series) it runs a recognition arm. That arm has had two successive flagship awards: the Global 500 Roll of Honour from 1987 to 2003, and Champions of the Earth from 2005 onwards. Both honour environmental achievement; neither is a prize for any single technical discipline.

State PCS 2019 Q102 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q102 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer