"It’s an Asian thing. We value reputations and names very much. We don’t want to be put to shame," Elisea Gillera Gozun, an environment activist from the Philippines, said in an interview with Reuters. "
We react more to that rather than the fear of regulation," said Gozun, one of six winners of the annual Champions of the Earth awards due to be presented by the UN to environmental leaders in Singapore on Thursday.
The 54-year-old mother of two cited the example of a textile firm in Manila which had discharged untreated water into the city’s main river in the 1990s, and was shamed into cleaning up the effluent after the government named it as one of the "dirty dozen" responsible for polluting the river.
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