‘Nobel for environment’: India’s Pavan Sukhdev wins Tyler Prize

Since 2008, Indian banker-turned-environmentalist Pavan Sukhdev has been warning the world about the kind of climate catastrophe currently unfolding in countries such as Brazil and Australia.

On Monday, Sukhdev, 59, was awarded this year’s Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, often called the “Nobel prize for environment”, for “revolutionising how decision-makers would come to view the natural world”.

Sukhdev, who shares the prestigious award with Gretchen Daily, a conservation biologist from the United States, is the third Indian in the last decade to receive the award, instituted in 1973.

In August last year, fires razed more than 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) of forest within the Amazon rainforest – the lungs of the world. The forest had not burned like that in the last decade.

A month later, more than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of land burned in Australia, killing 30 and leading to the loss of more than a billion animals. The Australian bushfires were 46 percent larger than the Amazon fires.

Some 2,000 homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in Australia. The total damages and economic loss will exceed $100bn, according to Accuweather, a US-based media firm that provides commercial weather forecasting.

In August last year, fires razed more than 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) of forest within the Amazon rainforest – the lungs of the world. The forest had not burned like that in the last decade.

A month later, more than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of land burned in Australia, killing 30 and leading to the loss of more than a billion animals. The Australian bushfires were 46 percent larger than the Amazon fires.

Some 2,000 homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in Australia. The total damages and economic loss will exceed $100bn, according to Accuweather, a US-based media firm that provides commercial weather forecasting.

A different part of the world erupted in unprecedented protests a month later against the government’s decision to cut down a forest to build a metro railways shade in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, known as the Aarey forest controversy.

“Local NGOs had demonstrated convincingly that the metro train sheds could be built elsewhere, without ecological losses to Aarey, but it seemed that the temptation of land-grab from nature was apparently too much. This is a familiar story in India and elsewhere,” Sukhdev told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.

In 2011, Sukhdev had delivered a TED Talk in which he warned of gradual degradation and depletion of the natural capital or ecological services such as minerals, water, arable land, habitat, fossil fuels and biodiversity required to support life on the planet.

Using the example of the Amazon rainforests, he said it fed “an agricultural economy worth $240bn in Latin America”. But he asked how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input?

“And the answer is zilch, exactly zero,” he said, warning it cannot go on “because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful”.

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Speaking to Al Jazeera about his 2011 TED Talk, Sukhdev said it was not prophetic.

“Science is not prophecy, it’s about understanding the natural world and I understand the natural world; it’s about understanding the way things work in nature,” he said. “It’s really for the people of Brazil to decide if they value the rainforests or not.”

A major cause of Amazon fires, experts said, is due to deforestation, particularly the fires started by humans to clear land.