Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg will donate all of her $1.15 million prize money from a humanitarian award to environmental groups.
Thunberg was selected to win the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity among 136 nominees from 46 countries, Jorge Sampaio, chairman of the grand jury of the prize, said in a statement on Monday.
“The way Greta Thunberg has been able to mobilize younger generations for the cause of climate change and her tenacious struggle to alter a status quo that persists, makes her one of the most remarkable figures of our days,” Sampaio said.
Thunberg will divvy up the prize money, starting with giving the equivalent of about $115,000 to the SOS Amazonia campaign, which is currently helping to combat the coronavirus in the Amazon. She will give another $115,000 to the Stop Ecocide Foundation to help support its mission to make ecocide an international crime.
Thunberg said in a Monday video on Twitter that the prize money was “more money than [she] could even begin to imagine” and that she hopes that it will help her continue to do more good in the world.
I’m extremely honoured to receive the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity. We’re in a climate emergency, and my foundation will as quickly as possible donate all the prize money of 1 million Euros to support … ->
1/3 pic.twitter.com/Eti6AJXSvj— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 20, 2020
“All the prize money will be donated through my foundation to different organizations and projects, who are working to help people on the front lines affected by the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, especially in the ‘global south,'” she said. “Also, to help organizations and projects who are fighting for a sustainable world and who are fighting to defend nature and the natural world.”
