Winnings to address 'biggest mass poisoning in history of mankind'

US physicist Dr. Ashok Gadgil was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement award last night at the Zayed Future Energy Prize in Abu Dhabi for his humanitarian work in Darfur and pioneering efforts to develop a safer and more efficient cooking stove. Gadgil has also made strides in developing a technology to inexpensively disinfect drinking water in developing countries.

Dr. Gadgil, who received $500,000 for the prize heads up the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

"We have never been in this place before," Dr. Gadgil said in a post-awards interview with Earth & Industry, referring to the climbing global population of over 5 billion people and its associated energy demand,

"We are on a collision course and we cannot continue in the old way otherwise we are toast," Gadgil said.

Gadgil's comment during the ceremony that "We are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment," was particularly striking considering the broader business context of the World Future Energy Summit going on this week in Abu Dhabi, an event also sponsored by the Abu Dhabi government, the backers of the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

Gadgil, who didn't even know he had been nominated for the prize until he was contacted by the selection committee in 2011.

"Just to be part of the finalists group is such a distinction," Dr. Gadgil said, "but I am overwhelmed to be selected as the winner."

When asked if he had any plans for the prize money, Gadgil did not even pause to blink, saying that the money would go directly to two projects.

Citing the one million annual deaths attributed to unsafe indoor cookstoves, Gadgil said the money would be invested back into the clean cookstoves project. Traditional cookstoves, he explained, which burn biomass and animal dung not only pose a major health threat, particularly to the women and children closest to the stoves as they burn indoors, in the case of wood, they also pose a major threat to the health of global forests. In Ethiopia, for example, forest cover has gone from 50 percent to 5 percent in the last half century and 80 percent of the population is still burning wood for cooking heat.

The second project Gadgil will use the prize money for addresses the problem of arsenic in drinking water. In what the physicist called "the largest mass poisoning in the history of mankind," huge numbers of people in Bangladesh are drinking arsenic-laced water "because they have no other choice."

Gadgil's lab has developed a process which removes arsenic from drinking water at a cost of roughly 4 cents per liter.

Other winners on Tuesday included the French energy management technology firm, Schneider Electric, in the corporate category. The UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which works with business and communities to reduce water and energy use, won in the NGO category.

“These are people that had the foresight to recognize that investing in the future is based on long term vision and the ability to innovate the technologies that the world so urgently needs,” added Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Director General of the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

The $3.5 million Zayed Future Energy Prize recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and longterm vision in renewable energy and sustainability.

You can learn more about Dr. Gadgil's projects at www.darfurstoves.org and www.arsenic.lbl.gov
Disclosure: Tim Hurst's travel expenses to Abu Dhabi were covered by summit host, Masdar.