From the Ramsar Forum

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment calls for expert nominations

(posted to the Ramsar Forum, 9 November 2001)

Greetings. The Ramsar Convention is closely involved in the design and development of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) which will provide information and guidance on wetland (and other) ecosystems, their status and trends, services to human well-being, and future scenarios and response options for their sustainable management. The MA is also importantly developing sub-global assessment methodologies and demonstration assessments which will provide valuable tools for Ramsar Contracting Parties.

The MA is now seeking nominations of social and natural scientists to participate as experts or reviewers in the MA process. The Ramsar Bureau encourages all recipients of this message to consider and nominate appropriate wetland experts for this role, so that the MA's work on wetland ecosystems may be of the highest quality.

Best regards,

Nick Davidson
Deputy Secretary General

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Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Announcement of "Call for Expert Nominations"

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is seeking nominations of social and natural scientists to participate as experts or reviewers in the MA process. The MA is a pathbreaking international assessment that will meet decision-makers’ needs for scientific information on the consequences of ecosystem change for human wellbeing and on the response options available to address undesired changes. As a ‘multi-scale’ assessment, the MA will seek to inform the global findings with information and perspectives from the local, national and regional scale, and inform local findings with a global context. The MA is designed to meet a portion of the assessment needs of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention to Combat Desertification, Wetlands Convention and other users including the private sector, civil society, and Indigenous peoples. The deadline for receipt of author nominations is December 15, 2001. Nominations for reviewers will be accepted through August 1, 2002. Nominations will be reviewed by the MA Board and Assessment Panel. Coordinating Lead Authors will be notified between February and March 2002 and Lead Authors by July 2002. Review Board Editors and reviewers will be notified in late 2002.

This call for nominations is being sent to the government focal points of the above conventions and to networks of academic, private sector and non-governmental experts around the world. We hope that you will distribute this call for nominations to colleagues who may know of qualified and interested individuals and to any distribution lists or Internet listservers that could reach qualified experts. As with other international assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Ozone Assessment, the salary of experts involved in the MA generally must be covered by their home institutions and governments. The technical work of the Assessment will be conducted in English and all nominated experts must be fluent in spoken and written English. For information on the nomination requirements and on the roles of the experts and reviewers in the MA process, please see the detailed documentation available at http://www.millenniumassessment.org.

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To join the Ramsar Forum, send this message: <join ramsar-forum>, without the < >, to ramsar-mgr@indaba.iucn.org. For more information on the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, please contact the Ramsar Convention Bureau, Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland (tel +41 22 999 0170, fax +41 22 999 0169, e-mail ). Posted 12 November 2001, Dwight Peck, Ramsar.