Climate Care spent a delightful and inspiring evening on Thursday 15 June celebrating the winners of this year’s Ashden Awards – which presents annual prizes to the world's best examples of sustainable energy in action. 

The audience gathered for the award ceremony, was held captivated by story after story of projects in the UK and around the world that are changing lives and cutting carbon, through clean, community-scale energy technologies.  The principle speakers, David Cameron MP and Lord May, where clearly moved and both spoke with great feeling of their humility and admiration at what the finalists have achieved. 

Climate Care is proud to have sponsored two of the eight prizes this year.  Our thanks, and that of our prize-winners, extends to all those individuals and organisations who, in demonstrating carbon-responsibility by offsetting their activities, enable us to support such exciting work.

This year's winners were International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), who won the Enterprise Award for their foot-powered irrigation pump, and GIRA of Mexico who won the Health and Welfare Award for, in the words of the judging panel:

"the designing and rolling out of an extremely effective fuel-efficient stove and for providing compelling scientific evidence of the dramatic health and environmental benefits of such technologies". 

Dr Omar Masera, seen above collecting GIRA’s award from Lord May, expressed his pleasure at receiving the prize and enthusiasm for the potential of carbon funding to promote sustainable development:

“We are very happy to receive the prize.  It is a recognition of many years of work and will support up-scaling and continuation of our work… We feel that for people in the UK to offset their emissions through supporting projects of this type is part of the future – these are the type of projects we need to pursue if we are to engage developing countries with climate change.”

The prize-winners will be taking away their awards to transform thousands more lives around the world.  As guests at the ceremony we left with something as valuable – inspiration and hope for the future.

Details of every finalist, along with a short video on each, is given on the Ashden Awards’ website.