Happy World Water Monitoring Day . . . and more (18/10/05)

Good morning CEPA people:

Happy World Water Monitoring Day for those of you involved in some kind of celebration for the day! While it’s just a tad late to be encouraging you to consider involvement, I’m thinking if it more as an advance warning for next year! They have a good web site at http://www.worldwatermonitoringday.org/ and you can see what they achieve by going to their WWMD results page here they have a report for 2004. Although originally USA-centred they now have an increasing interest from many countries with 50 countries sending in reports for 2004. This is a “hands-on” celebration with participants taking part in real monitoring of water quality in their local water bodies.

This is a good moment to share with you some more reading materials. Both of these are useful documents for your bookshelf - packed with information that you can use in your own leaflets, posters, project proposals etc.

The first has been produced by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a coalition of 175 international companies with a shared commitment to sustainable development through economic growth, ecological balance and social progress. In August 2005 they published a 14-page full colour document called Water: Facts and Trends. It’s intended to provide an overview of some basic facts and societal changes related to water, and the facts and figures available and the way they are presented provide an excellent resource for use at all levels. For example, in their page on freshwater availability they relate the number of cubic kilometres of water available in rivers, underground aquifers etc to the volume of water in an Olympic sized swimming pool. Now that I can relate to! You can download this document in PDF format (2.4MB) from their Web Site here:

http://www.wbcsd.org/DocRoot/KJGCg0546U2Hwdl1SrGQ/Water_facts_and_trends.pdf. If this proves to be a problem, simply go to their home page http://www.wbcsd.org/ and click on publications on the right, and then scroll down to Water: Facts and Trends.

Next there is a recent publication by WWF that has much relevance to our up-coming COP in Uganda where the theme is “Wetlands: supporting life, sustaining livelihoods” and there is a technical session devoted to the role of well-managed wetlands in alleviating poverty. This 36-page publication is called Freshwater and Poverty Reduction: Serving People, Saving Nature. Using case studies from Africa, Asia and the Neotropics, the paper investigates the relationship between freshwater conservation and improved community livelihoods. This can be downloaded in PDF format (1.66MB) from WWF’s Web Site here:

http://www.panda.org/downloads/freshwater/servingpeoplesavingnature.pdf .

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

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