Vietnam receives Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy

Vietnam’s biogas project has been presented with the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy at a ceremony at the UK Royal Geographical Society.

The five other projects that qualified for the final round of the competition are from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Vietnamese project, jointly initiated by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Holland’s Development Organisation (SNV) was praised by the organising board for its efficiency.

Launched in 2003, the project aims to build 168,000 biogas projects in rural Vietnam by the end of 2012, helping to improve the quality of people’s lives and the living conditions of hundreds of thousands of rural residents.

Since 2003, more than 78,000 biogas projects have been built in 40 provinces and cities across the country, benefiting more than 390,000 citizens.

It is estimated that each biogas project will reduce CO2 emissions by 2 tonnes each year and by the end of 2009 in Vietnam biogas projects had helped to cut emissions by 167,00 tonnes.

Sarah Butler-Sloss- the founder and president of the Ashden Award, said that Vietnam’s biogas project will help to upgrade the infrastructure and will last for many years. It will also create employment for building workers as businesses want to bring biogas to hundreds of thousands of farmers.

The Ashden Awards was first set up in 2001 to encourage the use of safe and clean energies to deal with climate change and reduce poverty.

Over the past 10 years, the projects that have received awards have helped to improve the lives of 23 million people all over the world and have reduced CO2 emissions by 3 million tonnes each year.