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WWF's Living Planet Report 2008 available for download (03/12/08)

Greetings Everyone:

Not long off the printing press is WWF’s latest Living Planet Report 2008 (LPR). This is a valuable addition to your communication bookshelves with its useful facts and figures, quotable quotes, graphs for your powerpoints –  in fact a whole grab bag of information for anyone trying to convince people that the “world is heading for an ecological credit crunch" as WWF’s Director General, Jim Leape has stated. It’s not just doom and gloom either – strategies for sustainability are also offered, again with facts, figures and good graphics.

As usual, the LPR includes the Living Plant Index in words and graphs for terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems (where freshwater has fared worst over the period 1970-2005), as well as for biomes including tropical forest, drylands, and grasslands. The index is also available for 5 biogeographic realms (nearctic, neotropical etc).

The report provides many different ways of looking at the human impact on our natural resources. At the country level, the report looks at the ecological footprint of nations – globally it notes that we exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity in the 1980’s and that excess has been increasing since then to reach 30% greater than supply in 2005. Helpfully, in this section you can look up the figures for your own country and see where your country ‘sits’ globally against other countries. There’s a similar section on the water footprints of consumption and production at the global and national levels.

In short, there are plenty of sound bites of reliable information for your communication needs with the above just a taste of what’s available. The LPR can be downloaded here

www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/living_planet_report/lpr_2008/index.cfm, and to make it even more globally accessible it’s available in Chinese, English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish (each about 4.3MB).

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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Sandra Hails, CEPA Programme Officer
Ramsar Convention Secretariat
Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 999 0176; Fax: +41 22 999 0169
E-mail: hails@ramsar.org
Web Site: http://ramsar.org
CEPA mini-Web site: http://ramsar.org/outreach_index.htm

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