World Wetlands Day - important news

Greetings CEPA people:

At last we are ready to reveal more about World Wetlands Day 2010 since we now have a slogan and some information on our interpretation of theWetlands, Biodiversity and Climate Change theme – but you will have to wait until Tuesday next week!

Today I would like to revisit 2009. As many of you know, we produce WWD materials every year and since 2002 we have made the design files of all the WWD materials available to encourage people to customize them for national and local use. Over the years the response to this has been growing. I have now completed the translations page for 2009 and you can view it here http://www.ramsar.org/outreach_materials_translations7.htm. Please get in touch if you have done something to customise our materials and it is not recorded on this page. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can view the translation pages from previous years. All very satisfying from a Secretariat point of view since we know we can only do so much in raising awareness about wetland issues with our WWD materials – so much more can be done to personalize our message and make it relevant within countries by you, our CEPA actors.

How WWD is interpreted at national and local levels is also shown on our WWD reports page where the reports you send are recorded. As many of you know, we are in the process of developing a new Ramsar web site and this has taken up much of our webmaster’s time year so that the posting of WWD reports has perhaps been a little less than before. Sincere apologies if you sent us one and it is not shown. Look here at what we have http://www.ramsar.org/wwd/9/wwd2009_reports.htm - a wonderful grab bag of ideas and initiative.

It’s always hard to focus on one report since every one deserves to be recognized but perhaps I can just mention one that stands out. The Pakistan Wetlands Programme, a UNDP/GEF project, has developed an amazing WWD programme each year for several years. This year they embarked on a two-week extravaganza of activities at many different locations and you can see their report - which fills their 36-page February volume ofWet Notes - under Pakistan 4 on our reports page.

Hope that has got everyone fired up to start thinking about WWD 2010 – more on Tuesday!

Best wishes from a very wet Switzerland, 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