Winners of the Ramsar Award for 2005 ... And a little more (14/06/05)

Greetings list members:

I'm forwarding the message below from the Wetlands Forum on the 2005 Ramsar Award winners, posted by Dwight Peck. As some of you will know one of the three categories for the 2005 awards was education, and I am sure many of you will be thrilled to see the two winners in this category - The Wetlands Centre, Australia, and Reiko Nakamura from Japan. Both Reiko and The Wetlands Centre are very well known to the Ramsar family and deserving of this recognition. As noted below, although we only have a brief press release for the moment there is more to come and I will let you know when this happens.

Just to follow up on the message on ecotourism sent out last Friday - a list member has very kindly supplied a link to the electronic version of Volume II of the ecotourism manual I mentioned in that message. Here it is: http://www.nature.org/aboutus/travel/ecotourism/files/manual_vol2_english.pdf.

Best wishes,

Sandra

-----Original Message-----
From: Dwight Peck [mailto:dpeck@iprolink.ch]
Sent: 14 June 2005 01:36
To: ramsar-forum@indaba.iucn.org
Subject: [Wetlands Forum] Winners of the Ramsar Award for 2005

Good evening, Ramsar Forum members. Since 1999 the Ramsar Convention, with the financial support of the Danone Group, has conferred the triennial Ramsar Award for Wetland Conservation upon worthy practitioners in the pursuit of Ramsar sustainable use values throughout the world. Profiles of the previous winners, in 1999 and 2002, can be seen at http://ramsar.org/key_awards99_index_e.htm and http://ramsar.org/key_awards2002_report.htm.

At last we are able to announce the winners of the 2005 edition of the Awards, whose conferral ceremony will take place at the 9th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Kampala, Uganga, in November 2005. At its 31st meeting last week, the Standing Committee unanimously agreed to confer the Ramsar Wetland Conservation Awards for 2005 upon the following laureates:

in the science category, Prof. Shuming Cai of the Chinese Academy of Science;
in the management category, Dr. SH. A. Nezami Baloochi of the Department of Environment in the Province of Gilan, Islamic Republic of Iran; and
in the education category, a shared award between the Wetlands Centre Australia in Shortland, NSW, Australia and Ms Reiko Nakamura of the Ramsar Centre Japan.

The press release by Sebastià Semene Guitart can be seen at the following addresses, and much more detail on these exemplary demonstrations of Ramsar principles at work will be posted soon. PDF versions are linked from the HTML pages.

English: http://ramsar.org/key_awards2005_press_e.htm
Français: http://ramsar.org/key_awards2005_press_f.htm
Español: http://ramsar.org/key_awards2005_press_s.htm.

Thank you for your attention, and good night.

**********
Dwight Peck
Communications Officer
Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, Iran, 1971)
1196 Gland, Switzerland
peck@ramsar.org, www.ramsar.org

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