STOCKHOLM: Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg will donate a portion of USD 1.14 million prize to fight coronavirus disease outbreak among the indigenous tribes of the Brazilian Amazon, CNN reported. This week, Thunberg won the very first Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity, launched by Portugal's Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, for her environmental activism.
In a Twitter video accepting the honour, she said the winning prize was "more money than [she] can even begin to imagine".
So she is giving the money away. Through her eponymous foundation, Thunberg said she will donate USD 114,000 to SOS Amazonia, an environmental organisation working to protect the rainforest that also works to fight the pandemic in indigenous territories of the Amazon through access to basic hygiene, food and health equipment.
CNN reported that the 17-year-old Swedish teen will also donate USD 114,000 to the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which aims to make ecocide or environmental destruction, an international crime.
Thunberg will donate the rest of the prize money through her foundation to causes that "help people on the front lines affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis especially in the global South," she said on her Twitter page.
Thunberg was selected among 136 nominees from 46 countries for the first-annual prize for her ability to "mobilize younger generations for the cause of climate change," Chair of the Grand Jury Prize Jorge Sampaio said in the winner's announcement.
She received a separate award in May for her activism and she donated all $100,000 of it to UNICEF to protect children from the COVID-19 pandemic. The charity that awarded her the prize, Denmark's Human Act foundation, matched her donation and launched a campaign to safeguard children's welfare during the pandemic.
Thunberg was 15 when she first began holding climate strikes and eventually, she mobilised thousands of young people across the world to skip school on Fridays to protest the climate crisis. In August 2019, she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to New York in a zero-emissions sailboat to speak at the United Nations Climate Action Summit.