January 30, 2017 – Ford Motor Company today announced the latest recipients of its Conservation and Environmental Grants, with $120,000 being made available to the successful entries. Accepted from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, the touted projects focused on three main areas: Environmental Education, Protection of the Natural Environment and Conservation Engineering.
Lebanon’s Arc en ciel scooped second place in Natural Environment, and with it $12,000 in funding. The Lebanese Conservation Volunteers (LCV) project, is looking at climate change and how the increasing threat of urbanisation is wreaking havoc on Lebanon’s biodiversity. In order to fight those threats, Arc en ciel, a former recipient of various Ford Grants, is forming a team of conservation volunteers to keep Lebanon’s forests safe. The team will receive intensive theoretical and practical training on conservation.
Lebanon also provided the top idea for Conservation Engineering, through the American University of Beirut’s Nature Conservation Centre’s initiative. The Local Conservation and Development with Open and Collaborative Science (LCDOCS) conducts consensus building workshops and provide the scientific resources and training to assess and monitor the results from its Green Map database. With its $15,000 funding, LCDOCS will develop Green Maps, which will be comprised of sites of natural significance and degraded environmental resources in 70 communities across the country.
In its 16 years of existence, Ford Grants has become one of the largest corporate initiatives of its kind in the region, created to empower individuals and non-profit groups that are donating their time and efforts to preserve the environmental well-being of their communities.
Recipients are chosen by an independent panel of judges consisting of academics and leaders from regional environmental organisations. The judges are seasoned environmentalists or academicians from the region carefully selected based on geographical coverage, age and gender equality. They look for initiatives that demonstrate a well-defined sense of purpose, a commitment to maximising available resources, and a reputation for meeting objectives and delivering planned programmes and services.
