LOCAL HAMMERS CHURE CONSERVATION PROGRAM IN NEPAL

The President Chure Conservation Program has come to a standstill for past four months. Despite massive deforestation in Chure forest range, conservation program is of less interest to the locals and as a result, this years’ budget of NRS 6.2 million has been left unspent. Following the arrest of the chairman of the community forest, the locals have refused to support the program, whereas some locals themselves are involved in the smuggling of timber.

25 January

Republica

The postponement of the Second meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Intergovernmental Committee for the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing

With reference to notification 2012-22 of 3 February 2012 concerning the postponement of the Second meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Intergovernmental Committee for the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing, I wish to inform you that the meeting will be held on 2 6 July 2012 at the Vigyan Bhawan Convention Center in New Delhi, India. The capacity-building workshop on access and benefit-sharing will be held on 30 June – 1 July 2012 at the same venue.

With respect to registration for these meetings, please note that participants already registered will be automatically registered for the new dates and therefore do not need to register again. Those who had not yet registered for the meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee and the capacity-building workshop are invited to do so by 30 March 2012.

For more details on the procedure for designating representatives for the meetings, please refer to notifications 2011-233 (Parties) and 2011-232 (International organizations and relevant stakeholders), available on the Secretariat’s website: http://www.cbd.int/notifications/.

Good news for tigers shows we’re on the right path

February 4, 2012
It can be a long week/month/year/decade (delete as appropriate) when you’re constantly confronted with bad news and the terrible things that we are doing to life on this planet. It can often seem like a never-ending uphill battle. And, well, that’s what it is, but every now and again you get some news that gives you a glimmer of hope.

Since late December, there has been a flurry of positive news coming from different parts of India, home to the world’s largest remaining population of wild tigers. Where they are being well protected, where there is a good relationship between forest officials, scientists and NGOs, tigers are breeding and, because of limitations on carrying capacity, tigers are spilling out of protected areas, returning to the forests from which they once vanished and taking up residence rather than just being transient.

News of cubs in Kudremukh National Park, in Karnataka, which has historically been ravaged by iron ore mining, and of 25 tigers residing in the Sathyamangalam forests of Tamil Nadu is further testimony to the emergence of the southern states as tiger conservation champions.

That said, news of cubs galore in Kanha Tiger Reserve (21-23 cubs) and Pench Tiger Reserve (21 cubs) in Madhya Pradesh, and even in Panna Tiger Reserve where the translocated tigers have given birth to seven cubs, suggests the battle for the title of The Tiger State is not over yet.

Further north, tigers have returned to the Nandhor Valley of Uttarakhand, while Assam is home to 143 tigers, 118 in Kaziranga National Park alone – the highest tiger population density in the country.

To be sure, things are far from perfect. Dispersing and transient tigers leave the protected areas to face forests destroyed for coal, diamonds, sandstone, iron ore and bauxite. Roads, dams and river-linking projects carve up the forest corridors. With forest loss comes the decline in natural prey and the inevitable slide into conflict with people and livestock. Poaching in India the feed the illegal trade in China continues. So far this year, there have been four tiger and nine leopard poaching/trade incidents reported. None of us can take our foot off the gas when it comes to saving tigers.

But what the good news from India tells us is that the tiger’s decline is not an irreversible situation; that with the right set of circumstances, tiger populations can recover, and with them the watershed forests that all our futures depend on. Now is the time to invest in progressing the strategies that are paying dividends (cubs), to spread the word of what works and what doesn’t, to open up the system of governance so that independent scientists, NGOs and civil society can work with the government officials.

See http://www.eia-international.org/good-news-for-tigers-shows-were-on-the-right-path

INDONESIA- MASSIVE PLANTATION FIRM WILL COMBINE ASSETS

The Indonesian government plans to create a massive plantation firm next month when it will combine the assets of state-owned rubber and palm oil companies, reports Reuters.

BIODIVERSITY MENTORSHIP PROGRAM #3- OTTAWA, CANADA

THEME: POLITICS AND BIODIVERSITY

1. Pauline Thereot (Imagineaction, Canadian Teachers Federation)

2. Brigitte Champaigne-Klassen (Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots)

3. Fred Sherman (2011 PC Candidate for Ottawa, Vanier)

4.Katherine Hobbs (City Councillor - Kitchissippi Ward of Ottawa)

5. Elizabeth Kilvert (Environment Canada)

6. Guiliano Reis (Professor of Education, University of Ottawa)

We welcomed youth to discuss biodiversity issues with the participating community leaders.  To date, about 60 youth from 14 schools have been involved in this community program. 

INTERNATIONAL WETLANDS DAY

Grade 6 students from St-Laurent Academy in Ottawa, Canada enjoy some marsh time. 

I am very thankful that we have the Macoun Marsh as part of our class so we can see all the different wildlife and be outside.  Shaylyn 

A message from Mr. Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the CBD, on the occasion of the World Wetlands Day – 2 February 2012.

Today we celebrate World Wetlands Day to raise awareness of these extremely valuable ecosystems that continue to be among the most threatened. We now recognize that wetlands provide many benefits to people, including that wetlands and their wildlife are a key part of the global tourism and cultural travel experience. From the stark beauty of Arctic lakes to breath-taking experiences of coral reefs, wetlands provide magnificent landscapes that tourists can appreciate. Behind the beautiful vistas and scenes, wetlands also underpin many services that tourists need, such as the availability of clean water, the recycling of wastes and protection from extreme weather events.

Tourism represents both a threat and an opportunity to wetlands. Unsustainable tourism has been called a “devourer of landscapes” for the extensive changes it causes in land use and to local economies and cultures. At the same time, if planned and implemented according to best practices, it can provide political and financial support for conservation and sustainable (or wise) use of wetlands and related ecosystem services.

Sustainable tourism means putting the principles of sustainable development into practice by ensuring that tourism protects the environment, conserves biodiversity, respects local communities and their cultural heritage and values, and provides equitable socio-economic benefits to all stakeholders, including by contributing to poverty alleviation.

With the ambitious goal (defined through Aichi target 11) of achieving by 2020, through ecologically representative systems of protected areas, the effective conservation of 17 per cent of the world’s terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of marine and coastal areas (many of which are wetlands), and with tourism already being the largest global market-based contributor to park agencies’ budgets, tourism is slated to play a larger role in the implementation of both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Ramsar Convention.

In the United States of America, for example, in 2006 more than 31 per cent of adults fed, photographed and observed wildlife, spending US$ 45 billion in the process; 1.5 million waterfowl hunters have funded conservation projects and generated a total of US$ 50 billion annually in economic activity; more than 35 million Americans take part in recreational fishing, almost all of it in wetlands, spending more than US $37 billion each year. The benefits of wetland tourism are not limited to rural or remote areas: some 200,000 visitors per year enjoy the 40-hectare London Wetland Centre alongside the River Thames, right in the heart of one of the world’s major cities. In developing countries, wetlands tourism is equally important: emblematic examples include the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the African Great Lakes, the Pantanal/Chaco region in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay (the world’s largest Ramsar site), the Tonle Sap in Cambodia – one of Asia's largest freshwater lakes, and most coral reefs. Tourism of some sort is invariably associated with most wetlands, large to small, and in most rural and urban areas throughout the world.

In 2010, the number of international tourists reached 940 million, and this is forecast to grow to around 1.6 billion by 2020. This economic activity generated by travel and tourism, also associated with wetlands, represents around 5 per cent of global GDP and up to one in every eight of the world’s jobs. International tourism expenditure linked to wetlands can be estimated at around US$ 925 billion each year, and this does not include the vast numbers of domestic tourists (thought to represent up to seven times the volume of international arrivals) or visitors who do not stay overnight. Economic values of wetlands for tourism are therefore huge.

Sustainable wetlands tourism is about effective partnerships at all levels. Efforts towards this will be enhanced through guidance to be discussed at the eleventh meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands to be held in Bucharest from 6 to 13 July 2012. The Convention on Biological Diversity, through our joint work programme with the Ramsar 3  Convention, is pleased to have contributed to this process through its own general guidance on biodiversity and tourism. The efforts of the Ramsar Convention will also be enhanced through its recent memorandum of understanding with the United Nations World Tourism Organization and both of these are among 27 international agencies, organizations and conventions that signed up to cooperate on the implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and the achievement of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, in November 2011 in Montreal.

Sustainable tourism can bring strong political attention and economic opportunities to securing wetland wise use and the maintenance of key socio-economic wetland values, both in Ramsar Sites and in other wetlands globally. We join the world community in celebrating today in recognition of the importance of wetlands and tourism and commit to continuing our partnership efforts to achieve sustainability and find the future we want.