Professor Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore - 560 012, India. Phone: (91-80) 360 0985 or 293 2507 or 293 2506 Fax : (91-80) 360 1453 or 360 1428 or 360 0683 Email: madhav@ces.iisc.ernet.in

The Volvo Environment Prize for 2003 is awarded to Madhav Gadgil for pathbreaking work in the field of Poverty / Environment lnteraction. His imagination, courage, and vision, grounded in the hard practicalities of the real world, have made them true and worthy scientists of the poor.

Professor Madhav Gadgil has conducted pioneering work in integrating research on biodiversity with the needs of people and their communities. He has worked to mitigate the conflicts of interests between man's needs and the requirements of conservation. He was the main contributor to the establishment of India's first biosphere reserve in the Western Ghats. Professor Gadgil is inspired by the firm belief that knowledge about the traditions and experiences of communities is of central importance to scientific research as well as ecological and social planning.

He has contributed to fundamental theory, illuminating the life cycle and competitive strategies of living things, taking his examples from dandelions to bamboo to elephants. This work led to the first decision in India to reduce the level of perverse subsidies to forest exploitation, and was the underpinning for the establishment of the country's first biosphere reserve in the Western Ghats. These were outstanding achievements given the clash of interests over land use between dam builders, loggers and forest harvesters, environmentalists and local people.

Motivated by a belief that ecology and equity need not be traded off against each other provided the traditional knowledge of communities can be recognized as central to the project of science, his work has shown that data bases of local knowledge can establish more robust and reliable information for ecological and land use planning.