The annual Whitley Awards Ceremony was held on 27 April 2016 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The flagship event of UK-based charity the Whitley Fund for Nature was hosted by wildlife presenter Kate Humble, and saw seven conservation leaders from seven different countries receive Whitley Awards worth GBP 35,000 each in project funding over 1 year in support of their work.
In addition, the prestigious Whitley Gold Award worth GBP 50,000 was presented to 2011 Whitley Award winner Hotlin Ompusunggu of Borneo, Indonesia, for her efforts to conserve orang-utans and their habitat using innovative healthcare incentives. Over 450 people attended the event, where the charity's patron, HRH The Princess Royal, presented the Awards.
The 2016 Whitley Award Winners are Gilbert Baase Adum, Ghana (Saving Ghana's frogs: a giant leap forward for biodiversity conservation); Farwiza Farhan, Indonesia (Citizen lawsuits: defending local livelihoods and Sumatra's iconic species in the Leuser Ecosystem); Makala Jasper, Tanzania (Forest stewardship: community conservation of coastal forests in the greater Selous Ecosystem); Karau Kuna, Papua New Guinea (Tree kangaroos as a flagship to protect Papua New Guinea's spectacular wildlife); Muhammad Ali Nawaz, Pakistan (Snow leopard conservation: a landscape-level approach in the mountains of northern Pakistan); Alexander Rukhaia, Georgia (Magnificent migrants: safeguarding birds of prey negotiating the Batumi Flyway); Juliette Velosoa, Madagascar (Saving the Critically Endangered side-necked turtle and its freshwater habitat).
For more information on the Whitley Fund for Nature, the Whitley Awards and to view short films about each of the winning projects, see www.whitleyaward.org. See p. XXX for the call for applications for the 2017 Whitley Awards.
