Star Alliance's new marketing campaign features two Ramsar Sites

Dear CEPA list members:

Yesterday the Star Alliance airline network launched its new brand campaign featuring the Alliance’s “Biosphere Connections” initiative. Five high quality films are now being completed by the National Geographic team who shot them in the USA, Turkey, Brazil, Tanzania and India.

The Star Alliance Network has a partnership agreement - Biosphere Connections – with the Ramsar Convention and a group of international organisations promoting environmental sustainability. Through this global cooperation, the respective organisations receive travel support from Star Alliance member carriers to foster the knowledge exchange between scientists, researchers and project workers.

The current campaign, produced in association with National Geographic, highlights five international projects: Abrolhos Archipelago in Brazil, Chilika Lagoon in India, East Usambara tropical rainforest in Tanzania, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey and the reintroduction of the Grey Wolf to the Yellowstone National Park in the USA. The films are professionally made and feature efforts by field workers from the Biosphere Connections partners: the Ramsar Convention, UNESCO-MAB, and IUCN, working in Ramsar Sites, Biosphere Reserves and World Heritage sites.

The most notable feature of these films is to show how Ramsar’s work, along with the work of the other partner organizations, has helped many people live side-by-side with nature, to grow businesses without hindering the environment around them and adopt good practice environmental sustainability. The clip on Chilika Lagoon in India documents the reconnection of Chilika Lagoon to the sea, increasing fish 7-fold, showing just one of the amazing things that happen when you bring global organisations together. The clip also features Ritesh Kumar, from Wetlands International and active member of our Scientific and Technical Review Panel and Ajit Pattnaik, Chief Executive Officer of the Chilika Development Authority (winner of the 2002 Ramsar Award).

The films will form the platform for the Star Alliance marketing campaign in early 2011. National Geographic will also be supporting the campaign through its own extensive distribution network, including television, books and collateral.

Ramsar has benefitted immensely from the travel support from the Star Alliance network enabling almost 50 key Ramsar contacts, including representatives from the Ramsar Administrative Authorities within Ramsar member countries and wetland experts to attend meetings and workshops on wetland issues since 2009. Towards the end of this year the Ramsar Secretariat will be organizing regional meetings in the run-up to the Convention's triennial Conference of the Parties in Romania in 2012 and the travel support will be put to good use in bringing key national contacts to these important meetings.

>All Star Alliance clips on YouTube

Oana Penea, Communications Officer, Ramsar Secretariat
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