Bangladesh NGO wins Energy Globe Award at COP22

Tahzingdong, a Bangladeshi non government organisation (NGO), has won the Energy Globe Award in Earth category at COP22 this year for its community-based forest conservation project in Rrowangchhari area of Bandarban district.

The award was declared today at the UN's climate change conference COP22, in Marrakech of Morocco.

The two other finalists for the award are the Inga Foundation of Honduras for its project named "Land for Life" and AMSED of Morocco for its project named "Waste water treatment for agricultural use with minimal Greenhouse Gaz Emission in Asselda Village."

The Energy Globe Award was founded in 1999 by the Austrian energy pioneer Wolfgang Neumann and is one of the most prestigious environmental awards today.

The objective of the award is to present successful sustainable projects to a global audience and to demonstrate that for many environmental problems feasible solutions already exist.

Projects which conserve and protect resources or that employ renewable energy can participate.

With the goal of restoration and conservation of the community managed forest resources in the Bandarban hill district of Bangladesh, the organization Tahzingdong has been implementing this project supported by Arannayk Foundation of Bangladesh since 2009.

The project covers 12,919.64 hectares of nine community conserved areas which are commonly called village common forests, and it includes more than 1000 indigenous forest dependent families.

Tahzingdong has built two community houses as a part of institutional capacity building and installed two water supply technologies that capture more than 387,000 liter of clean water in a month from the forests using a gravitational flow system.