Agence France-Presse on Thursday was awarded top prize for its high-quality reporting on Asia’s fast-evolving environmental challenges.

The prize for “excellence in environmental reporting by a media organization” was awarded by the Singapore Environmental Council, a powerful regional NGO, for a series of 10 reports comprising text, photo and video.

The AFP series included a report on Malaysian tribes’ people in the jungles of Borneo whose traditional lifestyle is being torn apart by a giant hydroelectric dam at Bakun.

It also includes a video report about the fight by residents of the Japanese coastal town of Iwaishima to stop a nuclear power plant, a multimedia report on efforts by Cambodians to protect their forests from illegal logging after the murder of an environmental campaigner, and work by a Philippine entrepreneur who has installed “solar light bulbs” in hundreds of thousands of slum dwellings.

AFP was rewarded because of “its diverse coverage and high potential for the stories to mobilise real change due to strong human-centric stories supported by policy and scientific facts,” the Singapore Environmental Council said.

Photo : November 30, 2011 – Manila – Siplicio Mondas (c), 73, and his family admire a new solar light bulb installed on the ceiling of their shanty town dwelling. AFP /Jay Directo