Six conservationists from Asia, Africa and South America walked away with the 2026 Whitley Awards on Wednesday night, sharing £420,000 (about $566,000) in funding for projects protecting everything from rare salamanders in the Himalayas to seabirds in the Galápagos.
Often called the "Green Oscars," the awards are presented each year by U.K. charity the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN). Princess Anne handed out the prizes at a ceremony at the Royal Geographical Society in London, with broadcaster and WFN ambassador Sir David Attenborough — who turns 100 next week — receiving a special tribute.
The 2026 winners
Each of the six laureates received £50,000 to expand their work. The line-up this year reads like a tour of the planet''s most quietly hopeful conservation stories.
Barkha Subba (India) is protecting the rare Himalayan salamander in the rapidly changing tea-estate landscape of Darjeeling, West Bengal, working hand-in-hand with local communities.
Parveen Shaikh (India) is scaling up community-led river conservation for the Indian skimmer, a striking endangered waterbird whose populations have already begun to recover thanks to her work in the Ganga Basin.
Issah Seidu (Ghana) is mapping habitats of four threatened guitarfish species along Ghana''s western coast and pushing to establish the country''s first locally managed marine area.
Marina Kameni (Cameroon) leads "Frogs and Farmers," an initiative on Mount Manengouba protecting threatened amphibians, including the Goliath frog — the largest frog on Earth.
Moreangels Mbizah (Zimbabwe) is expanding a coexistence model that lets lions move safely between protected areas and community land. Her interventions have cut human–wildlife conflict in some communities by up to 98%.
Paola Sangolquí (Ecuador) is rescuing the critically endangered Galápagos petrel, protecting nesting colonies on private land from invasive species and developing a model for seabird conservation that other countries can copy.
A bigger prize, too
A separate Whitley Gold Award worth £100,000 went to Indonesian conservationist Farwiza Farhan, whose NGO HAkA defends the 2.7-million-hectare Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra — the only place on Earth where orangutans, elephants, rhinos and tigers still share the same forest.
Why grassroots matters
The Whitley awards are deliberately not given to large international NGOs. They go to people who live in the landscapes they protect, often working with limited budgets and outsized political headwinds. WFN argues that real conservation gains come from these locally rooted leaders — and the data backs that up. Community-led projects tend to outperform top-down ones on everything from species recovery to forest cover.
"Receiving the Whitley award gives us the chance to strengthen communities, protect more nests, and secure a future for the Indian skimmer," Shaikh said in her acceptance speech. "And perhaps, in protecting this river, we are also protecting something far more fragile: our connection to the wild."
Subba, accepting her award, framed it as more than personal recognition: "As a woman belonging to an indigenous mountain community, winning a Whitley Award means both recognition of years of work on conservation and an opportunity to spread this work across the Himalayan landscape."
A good week for hope
The ceremony comes amid a steady drumbeat of conservation success stories — sea turtles rebounding, golden eagles returning to England, bird populations stabilising inside protected areas. The 2026 Whitley winners are a reminder that those headlines don''t happen by accident. They are the work of people walking trails, talking to fishers and farmers, and counting nests one by one.
Six more of them just got the funding to keep going.
