World Wetlands Day 2007 and 2008 (04/05/07)

Good morning everyone:

I have two items of news about World Wetlands Day – the first about WWD 2007, already but a memory perhaps for many of you, and the second about WWD 2008.

Our Webmaster has put in many hours preparing and uploading the WWD reports sent to us and if you can take a few moments to look here, http://www.ramsar.org/wwd/7/wwd2007_reports.htm, we think you will agree that we have had a very successful year in terms of numbers and diversity of activities. And these, of course, are just the ones we know about: many, many more are never reported. We still have a few more to post and we hope to get this finished soon.

In terms of how the Secretariat’s materials were used, we think this year surpasses all others in terms of creativity in using our poster, sticker, cut-out fish and the theme itself. Look here http://www.ramsar.org/outreach_materials_translations5.htm for a round-up of who-did-what with our materials. If you have customised our materials in some way and did not write to tell us, please do – send an email to wwd@ramsar.org.

And now some news about WWD 2008. As many of you will know, 2008 is the year of the Ramsar Convention’s COP10 (10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties), which will take place in November in South Korea. The theme for COP10, Healthy Wetlands, Healthy People, was decided by our Standing Committee in February of this year and it was also decided at that time to make this the theme for WWD 2008 as well. At the meeting of our STRP (Scientific and Technical Review Panel – the technical workarm of the Convention) in March, it was decided that we really needed further work to be done on wetlands and human health to present the broad picture of this issue at our COP10, and we now have a consultant working on this. I hope to be making use of this information over this summer for the development of our WWD materials for next February – more information on this later.

We think this theme will give WWD actors plenty of scope for imaginative activities reflecting their national and local situations. We hope this theme will be one likely to attract the interest of potential sponsors of your WWD events and also encourage some collaborative activities with other sectors/institutions concerned with human health.

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

*********************************************************

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

**********************************************************