No monetary prize was awarded to the equal regional winners and instead sponsors donated money to Wildlife Asia, an awareness-raising non-governmental organisation.

"The biggest challenge is for people to take the environment seriously," said winner Tewolde Gebre Egziabher from Ethiopia, a campaigner against life-form patenting and land degradation.

"Talking is easy -- implementing policies gets the last priority," he told Reuters.

Gorbachev was not present at the ceremony in Singapore but cannot be said to have ducked controversial stances.

"The big achievement was that he did not hesitate to put his name to complex problems that were regarded as strange issues 20 years ago -- he stopped attempts to divert great Russian rivers and stopped exploitation of the Aral Sea," said Alexander Likhotal, standing in for the former leader.

Other winners included Tommy Koh of Singapore for chairing the UN Earth Summit and negotiations on sea law, Cuba's Rosa Elena Simeon Negrin for championing small island development states, Iran's Massoumeh Ebtekar for work on industrial pollution and the US-based Women's Environment and Development Organization.

CLIMATE CHALLENGE

Winner Mohamed El-Ashry from Egypt, former CEO of the multi-billion-dollar fund Global Environment Facility that became the largest source of environment funding aimed at developing countries, said this was now facing a funding shortfall as the US had cut its contribution by a half for the next four years.

"There's a burden-sharing arrangement so it is politically difficult for others not to follow," he told Reuters in an interview, adding negotiations were ongoing. "Developing countries have an important role to contribute on environmental problems but their priority is poverty alleviation."

He said the biggest environmental problem facing the world was climate change. He urged the public to push governments into action and to create green markets spurred by commitments and timetables such as under the UN Kyoto Protocol.

"The answer lies in energy -- we need a sustainable plan and a carbon-limited approach. We need a major push on rewenables, there's huge potential for energy efficiency in developing countries, not to mention clean coal."

He said there were encouraging signs from the corporate community, pointing to firms such as BP on renewables, General Electric on energy efficient appliances and Toyota on hybrid cars.