Teen climate activist wins $1.15M humanitarian prize, donates all to environmental groups

A Swedish teen climate activist, Greta Thunberg, has recently won $1.15M prime money and have pledge to donate everything to groups working to fight climate change.

The 17-year-old teen was selected and won the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity from 136 nominees from 46 different countries.

Chairman of the prize jury, Jorge Sampaio, said in a statement that "She was chosen because of the way she has been able to mobilise younger generations for the cause of climate change and her tenacious struggle to alter a status quo that persists."

Thunberg responding via her Twitter handle said, “That is more money than I can begin to imagine, but all the prize money will be donated, through my foundation, to different organisations and projects who are working to help people on the front line, affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis.”

"I’m extremely honoured to receive the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity. We’re in a climate emergency, and my foundation will as quickly as possible donate all the prize money of 1 million Euros to support."

Thunberg said she would donate $114,000 to the environmental organization SOS Amazônia to address the coronavirus pandemic in indigenous territories of the Amazon and another $114,000 to the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which works to make ecocide, or environmental destruction, an international crime.

She added that the rest of the prize money will go to causes that "help people on the front lines affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis especially in the global South."

The 17-year-old has also been named Time Magazine's 2019 Person of the Year, won Amnesty International’s top human rights prize and used money from the 2019 Swedish Right Livelihood Award, often presented as an alternative Nobel, to open the Greta Thunberg Foundation.