What's New @ Ramsar

WWF's Living Waters Campaign offers valuable info pack

Living Waters info pack

The WWF’s Living Waters Campaign is making available a superb info pack as a "WWF response to the global freshwater crisis". Eminently useful for anglophone educators and public awareness officers everywhere, the pack begins with a main brochure which outlines the essential need for fresh water and the scope of the impending crisis in freshwater availability ("By the year 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population could experience water shortages"!) and then focuses on the river basin (or catchment) approach to integrated freshwater management. Several ways forward are alluded to briefly, including the Ramsar Convention’s contribution to conservation and wise use at international level. Also included in the pack are richly informative pamphlets on five key river basins: ‘The River Niger, river of rivers’; ‘The Vistula River, an aging queen’; ‘The Orinoco River, a South American jewel’; ‘The Yangtze River, taming the dragon’; and ‘The Mekong River, an unknown and threatened kingdom’, all of them including maps, stats, thumbnail photos, literary quotations, and explanatory text. No wetlands educator should be caught without this new info pack, which can be sought free of charge from Amalia Romeo of WWF International in Gland, Switzerland, aromeo@wwfint.org.

For further information about 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 ramsar@ramsar.org). Posted 30 April 2001, Dwight Peck, Ramsar.