Welcome to Green Planet Awards!

The Green Planet Awards aims to raise awareness about the critical situation the environment is currently facing, and human actions that adversely influence climate change.

Winners of Green Planet Awards 2009 announced

The Green Planet Awards 2009 competition has drawn to a close and the winners are in!

The inaugural Green Planet Awards 2009 event was held on 28th May in Dublin's Temple Bar Cultivate centre, and was presented by Rosanna Davison, model, vegetarian, and Miss World 2003, with guest speakers Green Party MP, Senator Deidre de Burca; and John Gibbons, journalist, Green Planet Awards 2009 Judge and founder of climatechange.ie.

First prize goes to the Sligo IT team headed by Patrick McLaughlin and Grace Herbert, who dedicated a whole week to Eco-eating, which included highlighting the vegetarian option at their canteen, promoting the growing of vegetables, and sharing resources on how our diet impacts the environment. Congratulations again to all at Sligo IT.

Patrick Murphy from the University of Limerick earned 2nd place and an award for his educational poster campaign promoting vegetarian eating and green living. Congratulations Patrick. Keep up the good work.

3rd place went to the campaign “Food NOT Bombs” from the college of Art and Design. “Food NOT Bombs” is an initiative headed by Andreas and Jonah who, along with fellow students, collect overstocked vegetarian food from restaurants and markets, and from these ingredients prepare and serve up delicious meals to the hungry for free on Dublin’s Thomas street.

Green Planet Awards 2009 Inauguration

A huge thanks to all participants for their creative input and selfless efforts to support the message and spirit of the awards, and a heartfelt congratulations to the winners for their innovative endeavours to promote eco-eating.

2009 Eco-Eating Irish Student Competition

Your task is to increase the public’s awareness of how eating habits affect the environment and personal health. Create debate, discussion and highlight the damage excessive meat consumption is doing to our planet and to our health in as many innovative and exciting ways as you can.
*All students who submit a campaign will receive a certificate of recognition for their hard work and dedication for a brighter planet.

2009 Eco-Eating First Prize - Reva Electric Car!

To be ambitious with your campaigns, you could: organise general awareness days or weeks; contact youxr local media – newspapers, radio and TV; lobby government bodies & TDs. Then take a record of your activities – materials, websites, pictures, videos etc, and send them into us by May 1, 2009.

For more information click here: Get Involved

Eco-Eating Effects

Climate Change
Excessive meat consumption contributes more to global warming than total worldwide transportation combined!

Economical For Your Health
The likelihood of contracting heart disease, diabetes, and many forms of cancer greatly increases the more meat is consumed, and a low fat, nutritionally-balanced plant based diet can cure diabetes and cardiovascular disease without surgery or drugs, prevent and halt the spread of cancer.

Loss of Rainforest (lungs of the earth)
Over 80% of Amazon deforestation is due to livestock being raised for food, therefore eating less meat will preserve the earth’s largest carbon sink.

Saving Water
Scientists have calculated that we would actually save more water by forgoing one pound of beef, or four hamburgers, than by not showering for at least six months.

Feeding The Hungry
1/3 of the world’s cereal harvest and over 72% of soya is used for animal feed, despite inherent inefficiencies. Grain currently fed to livestock is enough to feed over 2 billion people, yet almost 1 billion people face starvation every day on the planet.

Climate Change Urgency

Thousands of earth scientists have concluded with over 90 percent certainty that climate change is happening now, that it is human caused, and that if we don’t act NOW, as in the next two years, we could begin to see a collapse of the ecosystem within the next 20 years.

Our planet is getting warmer, the deserts are growing larger, droughts, hurricanes, cold snaps, tsunamis, earthquakes etc, are all becoming more frequent and more intense.

Many scientists are afraid, as they realize that climate change is happening faster than even the worst case scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted and that scientist have not been alarmist enough in warning the world of the need to act immediately.

Global Warming is Real and Human Caused!

In February 2007, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first major assessment of updated global climate science in six years, concluding that climate change was unequivocally human-caused. The scientists concluded with “very high confidence” that there is over a 90 percent chance global warming is occurring due to human actions.

During 2008, researchers at the University of Illinois in the US conducted a survey of 3,146 earth scientists from across the globe who universally concluded that climate change is occurring and that it is human caused. The report concluded “The debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

Climate change head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Dr. James Hansen summed up the view of the scientific community on the need to act immediately in June 2008 saying “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path.” He spoke of the possibility of mass human extinctions coming in twenty years if we don’t act immediately, pointing to tipping points beyond which there is no return occurring now.

He stated, “We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes. Arctic is the first tipping point, and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would.”

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