News from the CEPA e-mail list

WWD 2009 - forward planning! (29/04/08)

Greetings CEPA people:

Now that everyone has packed away their World Wetlands Day posters and flyers and moved on to other things for this year, it’s nearly time to start all over again with the planning for WWD 2009! In fact, some of our WWD contacts clearly already have, since we’ve already received a few enquiries asking about the theme.

The suggested theme of WWD 2009 next February will focus on river basins and their management. Our catchy slogan? We haven’t worked that out yet, so any suggestions would be welcome! What we do know is that we will be looking at the challenges of managing wetlands at the basin level, and the upstream-downstream problems that can arise when this is not done effectively. An estimated 263 basins cross national boundaries – we call them transboundary basins – and this adds another layer of complexity to effective management. We hope our theme will be used as an opportunity to help people managing, living in, depending on, or simply visiting their local wetland to develop a better understanding of the ‘big picture’ – their wetland, the environment that impacts upon it, and its management challenges in a basin context.

So for those of you planning ahead, it's time to start thinking about how you might plan a WWD 2009 event around this theme. Of course, that theme is only suggested to you and it will be the basis for the materials that we will be providing free of charge later in the year – everyone is quite free to celebrate World Wetlands Day in any way that suits them best. And seriously, if you do think of a snappy slogan, don’t hesitate to let us know!

We know that some of you have sent reports for WWD 2008 that are not yet on the Web - but our webmaster is slowly working through them and has not given up the battle. Our apologies: it's a challenging year for us with our COP10 in late October and the many associated official meetings we have to manage before that.

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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