UPPSC 2019 Prelims Q102: The 'Global – 500' Award is given for rare achievement in — Answer & Explanation

Q: What is the answer to UPPSC 2019 Prelims Q102?

B. 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.

UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 102 of 150

Verified against the official question paper. Answer as per the official UPPSC answer key.

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

(a)Gene preservation
(b)Environment conservation
(c)Population control
(d)Pollution control

Answer

Why

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 others are wrong

(a)Gene preservation — 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)Population control — 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)Pollution control — 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.

Award questions are answered by identifying the parent institution first, because the parent's mandate fixes the field. 'Global 500' sounds corporate — and that is the trap, because the far more famous Fortune Global 500 is a ranking of the world's largest companies by revenue and has nothing to do with this award. Once you attach the name to UNEP, the field follows automatically: UNEP is the environment agency, so its highest honour is an environment honour. Option (c) is then eliminated as belonging to a different agency, and option (a) and option (d) as subsets that are narrower than the citation UNEP actually wrote.

Key facts

The Global 500 Roll of Honour was instituted by UNEP in 1987 for outstanding environmental achievement by individuals and organisations, with separate adult and youth categories.
It was discontinued in 2003 after more than 719 laureates, and was succeeded from 2005 by UNEP's Champions of the Earth, now the UN's highest environmental honour.
India's best-known Global 500 laureate is Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, honoured in 1987; Sreekumar Krishnan Nair was recognised in 1999.
Other laureates include Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Wangari Maathai, Chico Mendes, Ken Saro-Wiwa and former US President Jimmy Carter.
UNEP was created in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and is headquartered at Nairobi, Kenya.

A smiling middle-aged African woman with braided hair under a cream headwrap, wearing a green dress with gold-and-teal embroidery at the neckline. — A UNEP Global 500 laureate and the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner — her tree-planting movement is precisely the kind of environmental achievement the Global 500 Roll of Honour was created to recognise.Image: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA · Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Study next

UNEP — its mandate, headquarters, governing body (the UN Environment Assembly) and flagship reports: Global Environment Outlook, Emissions Gap Report, FrontiersInternational environmental awards — Champions of the Earth, the Goldman Environmental Prize, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the UNEP Sasakawa PrizeIndia's national environmental honours — the Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar and the Amrita Devi Bishnoi Wildlife Protection AwardThe global environmental conference chain: Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, Johannesburg 2002, Rio+20 in 2012, and the treaties each producedIndia's environmental movements and institutions — the Chipko and Silent Valley movements, and the Centre for Science and Environment's role in environmental reporting

Common traps

Reading 'Global 500' as the Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest corporations — a completely unrelated ranking, and the entire basis of the trap.
Choosing 'pollution control': it is a genuine part of environmental work but much narrower than the award's citation, which covers conservation, activism and education as well.
Assuming the award is still current. It ran only from 1987 to 2003; UNEP's live award today is Champions of the Earth.

Both commissions ask awards in two shapes — 'which field is this award for' and 'who won it in year X'. The first is answered from the awarding body's mandate, the second only from current affairs, so anchor every award you learn to its parent institution first.

Related PYQs

UPSC_2007_GS1_Q62007Open & attempt →

Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Prize winner from Kenya, is known for her contribution to which one of the following?

(a) Journalism
(b) International economics
(c) Sustainable development
(d) Child development

Answer(c) Sustainable development

The same 'which field is this recognition for' question, asked about a person who was herself a UNEP Global 500 laureate — and the answer is the same field: environmental and sustainable-development work.

UPSC_2005_GS1_Q1502005Open & attempt →

Which one of the following pairs are correctly matched? Person — Award 1. Champa Devi Shukla — Goldman Environmental Prize 2. Dr. P. Sri Ramachandrudu — Vachaspati Puraskar 3. Ela Ramesh Bhatt — Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration, Academics and Management 4. Upamanyu Chatterjee — Lalit Kala Ratna Award Select the correct answer using the codes given below:

(a) 1 and 2
(b) 1, 2 and 3
(c) 3 and 4
(d) 1, 2, 3 and 4

Answer(b) 1, 2 and 3

Tests the same skill in matching form — knowing which award belongs to which field. The Goldman Environmental Prize pair turns on exactly the reasoning used here: identify the awarding body, and the field follows.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
'Champions of the Earth', the highest environmental honour of the United Nations, is conferred by which one of the following?
- (a)United Nations Development Programme
- (b)UNESCO
- (c)United Nations Environment Programme
- (d)Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
Answer(c) United Nations Environment Programme — UNEP launched Champions of the Earth in 2005 as the successor to its Global 500 Roll of Honour, which had run from 1987 to 2003.
practice — not a real PYQ
The headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is located at
- (a)Geneva
- (b)Nairobi
- (c)New York
- (d)Vienna
Answer(b) Nairobi — UNEP was established in 1972 following the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and was headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, the first major United Nations body to be based in a developing country.