News from the CEPA e-mail list

CBD/Ramsar's Climate change poster and Oxfam's Climate Chaos programme (24/08/07)

Good morning everyone:

Our Secretary General has recently written to our Contracting Parties about the urgent need for cooperative management of water-wetlands-biodiversity and climate change. He noted that “many Ramsar Contracting Parties are taking steps to cope with climate change and that Ramsar's Resolution VIII.3 'recognizes the potentially important role of wetlands in adapting and mitigating climate change' ". In addition our Scientific and Technical Review Panel (STRP) is actively working again on this issue. As part of the STRP's work, the Secretariat was pleased to host a joint Ramsar/CBD expert workshop on Wetlands, Water, Biodiversity, and Climate change in March of this year.

One recent output of this work is an attractive and informative poster summarizing the importance and role of wetlands in climate change mitigation and adaptation. This is available in PDF format on the Ramsar Web site at http://www.ramsar.org/wn/w.n.climate_change_poster.pdf, and we hope that it will be helpful to you in reinforcing partnerships on water-wetlands-biodiversity and climate change issues. Further materials developed from this workshop and the work of the STRP will become available between now and the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties in late 2008.

In addition to this information and the poster, I would also like to draw your attention to some excellent materials from Oxfam. Their ‘Climate Chaos’ programme provides teachers with a week of activities on climate change for 9-11 year olds. Start here http://www.oxfam.org.uk/coolplanet/climatechange/index.htm to view their 5-day plan of activities including links to videos and excellent animations, classroom experiments, group projects etc.

Best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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