WLI-Oceania conference: Emerging issues for the Oceania Region

Greetings Everyone:

The Hunter Wetlands Centre Australia will host a conference on Emerging issues for the Oceania Region from the 28th-30th October. This conference will bring together government and NGO organisations, wetland practitioners, educators, researchers, wetland managers as well as staff and volunteers from wetland centres within the Oceania region. The aim of the organizers? To provide an opportunity for sharing, learning, and re-energising the work of participants.

Three key speakers, all closely linked with Ramsar, will help participants consider emerging issues in wetlands: Max Finlayson, George Lukacs and Pierre Horowitz, covering, respectively, wetlands in relation to climate change, agriculture and human health.  A workshop following this will look at turning these wetland issues into meaningful messages and there will be an opportunity to share experiences on what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and why.

I will have the opportunity to address speakers on CEPA action planning within the Convention and also to look at World Wetlands Day as a 10 year-old campaign, its strength, weaknesses and opportunities.  Chris Rostron will look at the Wetland Link International network of wetland centres, how it is operating in the region and the possibilities for future development.

For those of you in the Oceania region, there is still time to register for the conference and more information on that is available here  http://www.wetlands.org.au/SiteFiles/wetlandsorgau/Conference%20Program%20Optimised%20140909.pdf

For those of you not in the region, I will be sending a report on the meeting to this list once I return to Switzerland.

Best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat
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