Emmy Award winning journalist, author, and television personality Anderson Hays Cooper will receive a special recognition from the Zayed International Prize for the Environment for his outstanding contributions to investigative journalism and reports on the CNN news Show Anderson Cooper 360°.

“As primary anchor of the CNN news show, Cooper travelled around the world with Sanjay Gupta, a chief medical correspondent, and Jeff Corwin, a wildlife biologist and Animal Planet host, for Planet in Peril,” said member of the Zayed Prize Committee Colonel Ahmed Rafia.

“Together they investigated the current state of our planet, focusing on four major areas: global warming, overpopulation, deforestation and species loss,” he added.

Cooper reported from a wide variety of locations including Alaska, Brazil, Madagascar, Southeast Asia, and Yellowstone National Park, examining the effects of population growth, rising temperatures, and poaching, among others, on the global environment.

Cooper traveled to Brazil to examine connections between the rapid deforestation of the Amazon River Basin and changes in the world's climate, embedding with 'poacher police' amid raids of illegal logging camps.

In Thailand and Cambodia, he walked the markets where endangered animals are bought and sold to find out how their removal can affect entire ecosystems. Moreover, he traveled to Greenland to report on its melting ice sheet, where Cooper witnessed one of the world's newest islands, discovered when the ice receded.

In 2006, Anderson Cooper 360°was nominated twice for a GLAAD Award in the category of 'Outstanding TV Journalism - News Segment'. The show has won the following awards:

Founded in 1999 by vice-president and prime minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai Shaikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Zayed International Prize for the Environment recognises and encourages environmental achievements supporting and promoting the implementation of Agenda 21, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation for Sustainable Development, in line with the vision and philosophy of the late Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, father of UAE. – TradeArabia News Service