EcoPeace Middle East wins prestigious prizes

Members of the jury included the director-general of the United Nations Office at Geneva; former chief of the Swiss Armed Forces, head of the Division for Security Policy in the Swiss Directorate of Political Affairs and others. EcoPeace launched the Program on Water Security in Washington DC last year to share its successful environmental peacebuilding model to meet the urgent global need for cross-border cooperation to mitigate water conflict and manage shared freshwater ecosystems.

EcoPeace Middle East’s Water & Energy Nexus project won a European Solar Prize in the “One World Cooperation” category from Eurosolar, the nonprofit European Association for Renewable Energy. This project is investigating how desalinated water produced in Israeli and Palestinian Authority territories could be produced and delivered to Jordan in exchange for Jordanian-produced renewable energy.

Prof. Peter Droege, chairman of the jury and president of Eurosolar, praised this EcoPeace project “for the promotion of cooperation between conflicting parties and the development of relationships in order to find constructive solutions for environmental challenges.”

Photo: At Geneva Center for Security Policy awards, from left, Lt. General André Blattmann, former chief of the Swiss Armed Forces; GCSP Director Christian Dussey; Marina Djernaes, director of the EcoPeace Program on Water Security; EcoPeace Director of Development Dalit Wolf Golan; Michael Møller, director-general of the UN Office at Geneva; Jane Royston of the Swiss Science and Innovation Council; and Prof. Nayef Al-Rodhan, head of the GCSP Geopolitics and Global Futures Programme.