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Swiss Re announces ReSource Award 2004 for sustainable water management strategies

ReSource Award 2004

Swiss Re, one of the world's leading reinsurers, presented the second "ReSource Award" at its Centre of Global Dialogue in Zurich, Switzerland, in April 2004. This annual competition for innovative watershed management projects carries total prize money of USD 100,000. The ReSource Award for 2004 was officially launched at the ceremony.

Swiss Re feels that it has a duty to contribute to the development and implementation of sustainable water management strategies and practices. To complement other water-related initiatives, the company launched the International ReSource Award for Sustainable Watershed Management in 2002. The award actively supports the planning, evaluation and implementation of water-related projects with the aim of promoting awareness and encouraging the efficient use of this precious resource. The main prize in the 2003 award was given to a land-reform project in Vietnam; the 2002 award went to a project proposing a financing mechanism to preserve fragile water resources in Guatemala. The ReSource Award is conferred on projects selected by a panel of independent international experts in water management and sustainability.

We are now looking to attract interested parties involved in watershed management to participate in the 2004 award, and would like to ask for your support. By placing the attached "banner" on your own "water" website or on your "Links" page and linking it to www.swissre.com/resource, you will be giving interested participants direct access to the "ReSource Award" homepage.

Alternatively, you may prefer just to use the ReSource Award 2004 icon and link it to www.swissre.com/resource. This site provides all the information needed by participants including deadlines, names of the members of the international panel of patrons (who recognise the valuable contribution made by the award) and the international jury, deliverables, the application form and the address to which applications must be submitted.

We would like to thank you for supporting the contribution being made to sustainable watershed management and would appreciate a short e-mail to resource_award@swissre.com from your webmaster with your URL once you have installed the link.

Should you need ReSource Award 2004 flyers (see pdf on the award website) for events or other activities, please send an e-mail to resource_award@swissre.com.

Yours sincerely,

Claude R. Etique
Chairman of the ReSource Award Jury

Thomas Streiff
Jury Coordinator

PS: Please feel free to forward this announcement (in its entirety) to other interested organisations.

For further information about the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, please contact the Ramsar Convention Secretariat, Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland (tel +41 22 999 0170, fax +41 22 999 0169, e-mail ramsar@ramsar.org). Posted 2 July 2004, Dwight Peck, Ramsar.