A Report from Ramsar's new CEPA Oversight Panel - and a new fisheries publication (06/07/06)

Greetings everyone:

Two items of news today, the first relates to Ramsar’s new CEPA Oversight Panel, what it is set up to do, and the outcome of its first meeting. The second is a new-ish publication on co-management of fisheries, a topical subject area given our focus for World Wetlands Day 2007 on fisheries.

1. As some readers will be aware, through COP9 Resolution IX.18 and Decision 12 of Standing Committee's 34th meeting in April of this year, a CEPA Oversight Panel was set up to (a) monitor and report on the implementation of the Convention's Communication, Education, and Public Awareness (CEPA) Programme established by Resolution VIII.31, and (b) examine and set priorities for communication, education and capacity building in collaboration with the Wetlands International CEPA Specialist Group and the new Advisory Board on Capacity Building for the Ramsar Convention.

The Panel met for the first time on May 29th, 2006, and the report of this meeting, along with background information on the structure, function and membership of the Panel, is available here http://www.ramsar.org/outreach_oversight_panel.htm. You will find a link on this page to some information on the new Advisory Board on Capacity Building.

2. A publication from FAO yet again highlights the need for technical people to brush up their CEPA skills! The purpose of the Guidelines for designing data collection and sharing systems for co-managed fisheries is to provide fisheries managers with the knowledge they need for collecting and sharing the essential data and information required if fisheries resources are to be co-managed sustainably.

The report is available for download in two parts: Part 1: Practical guide; and Part: Technical guidelines. The Practical Guide is written specifically for managers and facilitators, offering simple, practical advice on helping stakeholders identify their information needs in relation to their own management responsibilities and objectives, and helping them to develop effective ways of collaborating on collecting and sharing information. Part 2 provides more technical detail on each of the sections in Part 1.

This two-part report is based on the practical experiences of a number of institutions in seven countries including, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda and Viet Nam. You can download both parts here:

Part 1 here: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/008/a0230e/a0230e00.pdf
Part 2 here: ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/008/a0231e/a0231e00.pdf

Now a warning about downloading Part 1 – either I’m missing a few brain cells or this is quite hard to download in its entirety: I found that I needed to download it in 3 sections but maybe some of you will figure out how to get down in one file! Part 2 is fine. If you really end up in trouble, try going to http://www.fao.org and typing in the title of the publication in their search engine – that works too and gets you to zipped files that work fine.

Best regards, 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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