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IIED Senior Fellow Wins Global Environment Prize

November 11, 2004 (London, UK) -- David Satterthwaite, Senior Fellow with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), receives the prestigious Volvo Environment Prize today in Sweden. With close to half the world’s population and most of the world’s economy now in urban areas, Satterthwaite’s work bears increasing importance and urgency.

Citation by the Prize Committee:
"Over the last 25 years, David Satterthwaite has produced trail-blazing analyses of human settlements in developing countries ranging from mega cities to spontaneous slums. He has built an increasingly secure and authoritative foundation for our recognition and understanding of the complexity of the whole range of issues and problems of the urban environment and their dynamic interactions." (see the Volvo website: http://www.environment-prize.com/)

Satterthwaite is awarded the prize together with fellow winners Jaime Lerner (former mayor of Curitiba in Brazil) and Dr. Luisa and Dr. Mario Molina (for their work on air pollution in Mexico). Now in its 15th year, the Volvo Prize is considered to be one of the world’s most prestigious environment awards. This year, it honours outstanding contributions in countering the environmental effects of urbanisation.

David Satterthwaite trained as a development planner at University College, London and received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. In 1974, he joined the IIED as research assistant to IIED’s founder, Barbara Ward. From 1978, Satterthwaite worked with the Argentine specialist Jorge Hardoy in developing IIED’s urban research programme.

From its inception, the Programme has based its work on strong local partnerships with teams in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their work explores the large role of low-income groups and their community organizations in building the cities of these regions - efforts often misrepresented or deemed illegal - see Hardoy and Satterthwaite’s 1989 book Squatter Citizen.

Environmental conditions are often so bad in low-income settlements that one child in four dies before their fifth birthday: IIED’s Programme strives to raise awareness of these serious environmental problems in urban areas. The work tackles the issues related to the lack safe and sufficient water, sanitation, and decent housing. When Satterthwaite worked with a World Health Organization Commission on Health and the Environment in the early 1990s, it was nicknamed the ‘Bugs and Shit’ Commission because this summarized the most serious environmental problems from the poor’s perspective.

IIED’s urban work also emphasized that these environmental health problems did not imply environmental degradation, yet the two are often considered as synonymous. In this, it challenged the conventional wisdom that poverty was a cause of environmental degradation. It emphasized that the consumption and waste generation patterns of middle and upper income groups contribute far more to environmental degradation than low-income groups. To emphasize this, it suggested the need for a Trump Index by which each individual’s contribution to global unsustainability can be measured - and emphasized that one Donald Trump contributes as much to global ecological unsustainability as millions of urban poor Indians.

A central theme of IIED’s urban work has been how to support the efforts of low-income groups and their community organizations in building and developing their homes and neighbourhoods. This has led to innovative and cost-effective approaches to improving urban environments through fostering partnerships between homeless/urban poor federations and governments and international agencies.

IIED’s urban work has also shown the large under-estimations in official statistics in the scale of urban poverty and in deficiencies in provision for water and sanitation in urban areas.

In 1989, Satterthwaite co-founded with Jorge Hardoy one of the world’s most widely cited and read urban journals, Environment and Urbanization, for which he continues as editor. He teaches at both University College, London and the London School of Economics (LSE). In 2004, he was also made an Honorary Professor at the University of Hull. Satterthwaite has advised numerous international agencies on urban environmental issues (including the Swedish, Danish, Swiss and British aid programmes and many United Nations agencies) and is a contributor to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The prize is well deserved. I find it impossible to think of anyone who, over the last 30 years, has had such a positive influence on urban environmental debates internationally. His combination of intellectual brilliance and committed engagement is hard to beat. The prize committee obviously found the same.”
- Gordon McGranahan, Director of the Human Settlements Programme at IIED.

For further information, visit the Human Settlements webpages.

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