World Wetlands Day Assessment

Greetings everyone:

During 2008 a consultant was engaged to carry out an assessment of World Wetlands Day. Why? WWD was first launched in 1997 and has grown rapidly over the last 11 years to become THE campaign day for the Convention: it was felt that after 11 years of evolution, an assessment could usefully look:

·       the efficiency and effectiveness of the Secretariat in identifying themes, preparing and disseminating appropriate materials, and reporting on WWD activities;
·       the diversity of WWD actors and their targets, and, if possible, the apparent impact of their WWD actions;
·       the needs and expectations of WWD actors in terms of WWD materials from the Secretariat;
·       the need and potential for further development of WWD, in the light of the above, to reach out effectively to a broader range of WWD actors and targets on key wetland issues.

The assessment relied on two sources of information: the WWD web reports from 2003-2007 and an online survey in English, French, and Spanish directed at 335 wetland actors who reported their WWD activities to the Secretariat in 2006 and 2007. A highly credible response rate of 51% was achieved from the latter.

The full report is now available in PDF format here http://www.ramsar.org/wwd/wwd_assessment_2009.pdf. The bad news is that it is only available in English at the moment. Our apologies. But the good news is that we hope to produce a short ‘popular’ version of the report that will be both a celebration of WWD and also a commentary on key actors, key targets, measuring the impact of WWD events, and suggestions for the future. Thiswill be in English, French and Spanish. I would love to promise this will be ready well before WWD 2010, but I can only promise I will try!

The Secretariat presented the full WWD assessment report to our Standing Committee meeting in May and we produced a brief report on the assessment for the meeting which you can access here: http://www.ramsar.org/sc/40/key_sc40_doc20.pdf. This gives a quick look at major findings (who the major actors are, who their key targets are, regional differences in activity, assessing impact of WWD activities, ideas and recommendations from WWD actors) but if you have time, please do look through the full report.

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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Sandra HAILS
CEPA Programme Officer
Ramsar Convention Secretariat
Rue Mauverney 28, 1196 Gland, Switzerland
hails@ramsar.org
Tel: +41 22 9990176
Fax: +41 22 9990169