Lebanon’s Environmental Projects Receive $27,000 Total from Ford Motor Company Conservation and Environmental Grants

• Since it first began in the Middle East and recently expanded to cover North Africa, Ford Motor Company’s Conservation and Environmental Grants have supported over 200 projects with $1.64 million granted to date

Ford Motor Company handed over a total of $27,000 grants to environmental projects in Lebanon as part of the 2016 Ford Motor Company Conservation and Environmental Grants initiative. Natural Environment Arc en ciel scooped second place in the Natural Environment category and with $12,000 in funding. The Lebanese Conservation Volunteers (LCV) project is looking at climate change and how the increasing threat of urbanisation is wreaking havoc on Lebanon’s biodiversity. In order to fight those threats, Arc en ciel, is forming a team of conservation volunteers to keep Lebanon’s forests safe. The team will receive intensive theoretical and practical training on conservation. Conservation Engineering Lebanon provided the top idea for Conservation Engineering, through the American University of Beirut’s Nature Conservation Centre’s initiative. The Local Conservation and Development with Open and Collaborative Science (LCDOCS) conducts consensus building workshops and provide the scientific resources and training to assess and monitor the results from its Green Map database. With its $15,000 funding, LCDOCS will develop Green Maps, which will be comprised of sites of natural significance and degraded environmental resources in 70 communities across the country. The awards were presented by Mr. Mehdi All-Rais, Regional Manager at Ford Middle East.

Apart from Lebanon, the latest recipients of Ford’s Conservation and Environmental Grants were successful applicants from Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia with a total of $120,000 made available.

Now running for 16 years, Ford Grants has become one of the largest corporate initiatives of its kind in the region, created to empower individuals and non-profit groups that are donating their time and efforts to preserve the environmental well-being of their communities.

Photo captions: (left to right)

Samer El Khoury, Marketing Manager at Tewtel Group; Rana Eyamie, Marketing Manager at Tewtel Group; Abdou Tannoury, Research and Development of Agricultural Program at Arc en Ciel; Rana Abdou, Head of Agricultural Program at Arc en Ciel; Mehdi Al-Rais, Regional Manager at Ford Middle East; Dr. John Davey, competition juror; Dr. Najat Saliba, Director of AUB Nature Conservation Center; Diane Aoudi, Operations Manager at AUB Nature Conservation Center; Samy Kayed, Grants Coordinator at AUB Nature Conservation Center; Samy Kayed; and Elie Daniel, National Sales Manager at Ford Middle East.