Our closest relatives are in danger and UNESCO is responding to their need

Great Ape Moment :BLISS, A six-day-old baby orangutan snuggles up.
Picture by EPA/ROLAND WEIHRAUCH

The Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) was established in 2001. It aims to conserve the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) and their habitat — primarily forested tropical ecosystems that provide important services to humanity, through pro-poor conservation and sustainable development strategies.

UNESCO: Building Equitable, Inclusive Green Societies

“Achieving genuine sustainable development calls for more than green investment and low carbon technologies. Besides its economic and ecological dimensions, the social and human dimensions are central factors for success. Ultimately, we must focus our efforts on building green societies.” 
Irina Bokova, Director-General, UNESCO.


Click here for more on UNESCO's support for sustainable development and Rio + 20, The Earth Summit.

UNESCO Joins Hands With Ford Motor Company To Drive Awareness Of Conservation And Environmental Grants

Source: Middle East Events

Entries Now Open For 2011 Ford Grants Offering Funding For Local Environmental Groups. A Total Of US$100,000 Available For Grass Roots Green Initiatives In GCC And Levant. US$1.1million Granted To 130+ Local Environmental Initiatives Across The GCC And Levant Countries Since 2000.

Read more!

2011 -- The International Year of Forests

Preparations for the observance of Forests 2011 are taking place at the national, regional and international levels.


To celebrate Forests 2011, the United Nations Forum on Forests Secretariat (UNFFS) is working in collaboration with the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival to organise the International Forest Film Festival (IFFF).

IFFF winning films will be presented to delegates of all 192 countries at the launch of the International Year of Forests 2011 at United Nations Headquarters, New York in February, 2011. The launch of the International Year will take place as part of the official program of the ninth session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). Subsequently, the winning films will also be screened around the world.

The International Forest Film Festival aims to raise awareness on the importance of forests, their relationship with people and the planet we share, and consequently, to inspire a sense of personal responsibility/stewardship for a greener, more equitable, sustainable future.

UNESCO-International Council for Science

In July, a small International Council for Science (ICSU) delegation headed by the Executive Director Deliang Chen met with Gretchen Kalonji, the new UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, and her colleagues at UNESCO. Discussions centered on potential areas of cooperation between the two organizations, including the initiative emerging from the ICSU visioning process, Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), the new Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), and science education. It was agreed that there is potential to hold joint regional workshops throughout 2011 in preparation for the UN Earth Summit in 2012 (Rio+20), and that ICSU and UNESCO need to show leadership regarding the contribution of PECS and DIVERSITAS to the new Intergovernmental Science-Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Is the UNESCO Underwater Heritage Convention Well Considered?

Following up a New Orleans conference in February 2010, eight scientists (six from the United States) have published a report titled "Underwater Cultural Heritage & UNESCO in New Orleans: An Introduction". The Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention was approved by the UNESCO General Conference in November of 2001, and went into force for ratifying states in January 2009. To date 32 nations have ratified the Convention, not including the United States of America. (Nor have France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Sweden nor the United Kingdom among many other non-ratifiers.)

The report is quite critical of aspects of the Convention, as is demonstrated by this excerpt:

For now, a feeling remains in many heritage and scientific circles that sections of the Convention are an unenforceable set of Utopian rules and regulations compiled by legal teams who incorporated minimal fundamental input from archaeologists. If the initiative is compared to terrestrial archaeology, where countries would react with outrage to any supposition that they need to be centrally supervized so intimately from abroad, many marine archaeologists with decades of experience and contribution are highly concerned about why they are suddenly being forcefully re-educated in their core competencies.

Download the entire report (PDF, 26 pages) 

Check out UNESCO's website on safeguarding underwater cultural heritage.

June 4: World Environment Day 2010

The theme of WED 2010 is “Many Species. One Planet. One Future.”

Pittsburgh hwas selected as the North American host city by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to join World Environment Day 2010. More...

Message from Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO on the occasion of the World Environment Day 2010.

Africa Analysis: A level playing field for biodiversity

Source: Linda Nordling, SciDev.Net, 22 December 2009

In 2010, the UN's International Year of Biodiversity, the world is expected to agree new goals for preserving species.

The Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), scheduled for late October next year in Nagoya, Japan, will also try to establish an international framework for ensuring more equitable access to, and sharing of, genetic resources.

But like many regions, Africa is already certain to fail to "achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss" — the last CBD target set in 2002. Scientists say extinction rates are accelerating rather than slowing down and biodiversity-rich areas such as Africa are particularly vulnerable to the decline.

Will new targets for 2020 be any more achievable?

Read more of the article!

Comment from the editor: UNESCO can play a key roll in the next few months helping African nations to plan for the October meeting, and indeed in participating in the International Year for Biodiversity and preparing for the long term effort needed to preserve and protect African biodiversity.

It is especially important that the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO revive and support the U.S. committee for the UNESCO's People, Biodiversity and Ecology Program. The U.S. scientific community working in the field of biodiversity is the world's strongest, and UNESCO needs its active participation to achieve what is must in this important endeavor. JAD

Image source

Irina Bokova on Climate Change

UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova gave an informative briefing on UNESCO's actions with regard to Climate Change during the Copenhagen meeting earlier this month.

Click here to watch the interview which is in English.

UNESCO publishes outcome brochure of its conference on broadcast media and climate change

Last September UNESCO, in partnership with UNEP, organized an International Conference on ‘Broadcast Media and Climate Change: A Public Service Remit’. As a result of this event, international and regional broadcasting unions have decided to increase cooperation in order to give media exposure to climate change. UNESCO launches a brochure, A Commitment to Act Now: Broadcast Media and Climate Change, published as an outcome of the Conference.

Read more!

"Climate Change and Water"

This special report brings together messages on water and climate change from the World Water Development Report 3: "Water in a Changing World." The WWDR3 shows that changes in our water resources are shaped to a great extent by a number of key externalities, among them climate change, and that decisions taken far from the conventionally defined water sector have a tremendous influence on water resources and how they are used or misused.

Full report in PDF format (2.73 MB);Number of pages: 28; Publication date: November 2009

UNESCO International Conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change

The International Conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change: A Public Service Remit will be held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, 4 - 5 September 2009.

This high-level international event is organised by UNESCO in partnership with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), regional broadcasting unions and other international broadcasting organizations to consider a global consensus to raise public awareness on the challenges of climate change. More

In Layman's Terms: The IPCC Report on Climate Change

Want to know more about how you can help the environment but don't have the time or scientific expertise to weed through what can be extremely dense reports? A new report summarizing the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on climate change can help.

For laymen like me, Climate in Peril: A Popular Guide to the Latest IPCC Reports is a useful guide that seeks to explain the 2007 Synthesis Report put out by the IPCC. The IPCC which is an evaluative body that assesses the risk of climate change brought on by human activity.




The guide itself is helpful as it uses formats and structures that non-specialists in the field can understand. Its goals is to raise awareness regarding the urgency of acting on climate change and to provide information that may help bridge the gap between science and policy.

The report can be found here:

Climate in Peril: A Popular Guide to the Latest IPCC Reports

The guide was recently put out by GRID-Arendal and SMI books with the support of multiple organizations; UNESCO's programs and research contributed to the information assessed by the IPCC in its reports. More information about ordering the book or viewing it in other languages can be found on UNESCO's site. Reading the short document and considering how to act on the information presented is one small way to contribute to the climate change issues that affect us all.

UNESCO and Ecomigration

Source: "Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe," Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, February 23, 2009.

There were about 25 million ecomigrants in the world a little more than a decade ago, said Norman Myers, a respected British environmental researcher at Oxford University. That number is now "a good deal higher," he added. "It's plain that sea-level rise in the wake of climate change will inundate the homelands of huge numbers of people."

In Bangladesh, about 12 million to 17 million people have fled their homes in recent decades because of environmental disasters -- and the low-lying country is likely to experience more intense flooding in the future. In several countries in Africa's Sahel region, bordering the Sahara, about 10 million people have been driven to move by droughts and famines.

In the Philippines, upwards of 4 million people have moved from lowlands to highlands as a result of deforestation. And in an earlier era, about 2.5 million Americans became ecomigrants after droughts and land degradation during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

Editorial comment: UNESCO has a program utilizing its expertise in education, science, culture and communications to help small island developing states meet their development problems. Climate change will be especially devastating for those states, and UNESCO can help them to deal with the challenge. UNESCO natural science programs play an important role in encouraging the global scientific community to develop the understanding of natural resources and ecology, and that knowledge should underly all policy related to ecomigration. So too, UNESCO social and human science program can illuminate the phenomenon of ecomigration and its impacts.

UNESCO's education programs can help prepare people for ecomigration, both in the the countries that they will have to leave and in the countries to which they will have to move. The communications program may help countries deal with the use of media for the same purpose. Perhaps especially relevant will be efforts by UNESCO to help ecomigrants from these states to deal with the cultural impact of their forced migration.

That is not to say that the need for UNESCO services to assist other ecomigrants will be less acute or extensive. An ecomigrant fleeing from desertification in the Sahel will not face lesser challenges than one fleeting from inundation of his island home.

History suggests that when a people are forced into wholesale migration, violence often follows. UNESCO's primary mission is to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men, and doing so in the minds of ecomigrants may be especially important in the prevention of war.

John Daly
(The opinions expressed are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent those of Americans for UNESCO.)

CLIMATES OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Responding to the Challenge of Global Climate Change through Public Engagement and Social Innovation

5th Annual Ename International Colloquium
18th - 20th March 2009 in Ghent and Ostend, Belgium

UNESCO has issued a call for papers to be presented at this three-day colloquium that is to focus on the impacts of global climate change to the Low Countries, namely rising sea levels and increased river flooding.

Read more!

Image source: "Climate Change: Coastal Mega-Cities in for a Bumpy Ride," by Srabani Roym, CommonDreams.Org News Center.

The Grand Canyon

Last week I visited Grand Canyon National Park, one of the places chosen by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. We visited the north rim of the canyon rather than the more frequented south rim.


One approaches the north rim, which is quite isolated, passing through the forests and meadows of the Colorado Plateau. As the above photo shows, in October the aspens found among the pine forests turn gold. From the road we saw herds of grazing deer, and even a coyote, as well as cattle grazing in the multiple use national forest adjacent to the national park.

We were told that the National Park Service and the Forest Service differ significantly as to the methods that are most appropriate for protection of this environment. Moreover it was suggested that there have been significant changes in the Plateau due to the management techniques applied, and that that fact is evident from the difference in forest structure on the isolated mesa tops left by the canyon which have not been managed versus the managed systems of the national park and national forest.



The two images above are taken from the lodge on the north rim. Reconstructed after a fire that destroyed the original building, it is again an imposing and interesting building, which we were told is important in the architectural history of the United States, representing a peak achievement of the arts and crafts movement. Certainly the first view of the Grand Canyon itself from the lobby of the lodge leaves an indelible impression.


Walking along a rim trail one sees great views across the ten mile expanse of the mile deep canyon framed by tall and graceful pines. The canyons have of course been formed by the Colorado River and its tributaries, and the canyon ecosystem has been radically changed by the taming of the Colorado by a series of dams. Efforts continue to develop management techniques that both help maintain the biodiversity and character of the canyon bottoms and serve the needs of downstream populations.



A road branches off that to the lodge, traveling for miles along the Colorado Plateau, with viewing points provided on the rim providing views such as those provided above.

One of the great successes of recent years has been the reintroduction of wild populations of California condors in the Grand Canyon. The largest American bird, with a wing span of nine feet, the condor was almost extinct some years ago when a program was started to save the species by captive breeding. In recent years condors have been reintroduced into the wild and are successfully breeding in the Grand Canyon. The fortunate visitor can see them soaring over the canyon.

Archaeologists have discovered many prehistoric sites within Grand Canyon National Park itself, and even today there are Native American communities above and below the national park on the Colorado River. Indeed the history of the region through the expansion of the United States has fascinated Americans, and the larger region surrounding the Grand Canyon has been the site of many western movies. Thus the region offers tempting opportunities for social scientists. It also offers significant challenges for multidisciplinary teams to find ways for the long term management of a park system that receives millions of visitors per year, and is subject to pressures of many kinds from developers. Moreover, the system includes a very complex ecology, due in part to the wide range of elevations and climates it includes, and its site on the border between the Colorado Plateau and deserts to the south.

UNESCO Catalyzes Networks

UNESCO's budget is tiny when compared to the global governmental expenditures on education, science, culture and communications. Indeed, its total budget is much less than that of my local county for education.

UNESCO exercises no sovereign control over its member states. Each member state continues to exercise full sovereign control over its own people, territory and actions. UNESCO can not tell any state what to do, nor does it have any power to enforce the decisions of its governing bodies on its member states.

How then does it manage to achieve so much worldwide?

Examination of three networks of sites that have been created under UNESCO sponsorship provides one answer. They are:

• The World Heritage network of 851 natural and cultural sites of such importance as to justify the appelation;
• The World Network of 531 Biosphere Reserves which serve to develop and demonstrate landscape management systems and to serve as reservoirs of biodiversity;
  
• The Ramsar Convention network of 1755 wetland sites of international importance, totaling 161 million hectares.

In each case, individual member states nominate sites within their own territory, providing detailed discussions of the proposed sites to be included in the network. In each case, the sponsoring nation retains full sovereignty over the site, but commits to maintaining the site and to participation in the network with its own resources or those which it can generate from other sources.

In each case, UNESCO manages a review process to assure that nominees qualify for inclusion in the network and reviews the status of members of the network to assure that they still qualify. In each case, there is a subset of member states elected by the overall group of member states which is delegated oversight of the network, and a small bureau or secretariat to manage the networking functions.

In each case the member states have decided that the benefits of participation in the network more than justify the costs of participation. Decades of experience indicates that each network really works to promote cooperation among the sites included and to showcase important sites within the member nations to world attention.

The United States has been critically important in the creation of each of these networks, and Americans have provided intellectual leadership over the lifetime of each of them. Indeed, participation in each of these networks has provided a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, enabling the United States to achieve cultural and environmental objectives of its foreign policy in collaboration with other states. Through the collaborating networks these goals have not only been achieved more economically than would otherwise be possible, but indeed the goals might not have been at all possible without the collaboration of other sovereign states.

Finally, the networks provide the community of nations with an assurance of globally coordinated efforts to accomplish programs of global importance that would be beyond the capabilities of any member state alone.

UNESCO, Energy and Climate Change

On Monday, James Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, spoke to the members of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on the topic of "Energy and Climate Change". He stated that global warming and increased concentration of greenhouse gases are both occurring, and that scientists generally agree that mankind is contributing substantially to the buildup of greenhouse gases, and thus to global warming.

He projected the very desirable economic growth in the developing world, and noted the very major difficulty that if the world is to hold global warming to acceptable levels, the developing countries are going to have to make major changes in technology, since their current energy and agricultural technologies are "heavy" in the sense that they produce a lot of greenhouse gas per unit economic production. Even were the developed countries to achieve huge improvements in emissions, that effort would not be enough; were the improvements in developed nations emissions to be achieved by the transfer of greenhouse-gas intensive production activities to developing countries without the transfer to clean technologies in those developing countries, there would be no net gain for the reduction of global warming.

Mr. Connaughton also emphasized that the current emphasis on global climate change had had the unfortunate side effect of diverting the attention of policy makers from other environmental problems, such as water and air quality (and I would add desertification, loss of tropical forests, pollution, etc.)

Mr. Connaughton stressed that if we are to succeed in limiting climate change (and other environmental problems), the key limitation will be political will in developing nations, since we have adequate technology for the job. He also said that a critical problem was a major lack of understanding of the size and nature of the task before mankind.

In short, there is a major educational challenge for the world, to build the environmental literacy and numeracy needed to generate the political will to solve the problems leading to global warming and environmental deterioration. The effort is urgently needed, and must continue for generations.

Surprisingly, given that the talk was made to the National Commission for UNESCO, Mr. Connaughton did not make the further inference publicly that UNESCO was a logical entity to lead in the educational effort, building that public understanding and support. Obviously, UNESCO is the lead agency within the United Nations system for both education and communications and information. It leads in the natural science programs needed to develop appropriate understanding of the causes and remedies of global warming and other environmental problems, and the social science leadership needed to measure the success in changing knowledge and understanding of environmental problems.

If the White House really believes Mr. Connaughton's presentation, as does the author of this posting, then it should support a serious effort to expand UNESCO's program focusing on the environmental sustainability of economic development.

I spoke briefly with Ambassador Oliver after the talk, and she emphasized that that kind of an initiative would be a very appropriate one for a public-private cooperative approach. Voluntary contributions, both financial and in kind, would be a powerful stimulus to the development of such an effort on the part of UNESCO.

Global Change in Mountain Regions

©T. Schaaf, Yosemite Nat. Park, USA

Global Change in Mountain Regions (GLOCHAMORE): A world-wide network to study global change processes in mountains has been in operation since October 2003. It is based on some 25 mountain biosphere reserves in all continents that serve as monitoring and study sites. A research strategy has been worked out to:

* detect signals of global change
* identify the consequences
* suggest responses at local and regional scales

Among the more than 100 scientists and bioreserve managers are a number of Americans:

• Baron, Jill. Dr., Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University
• Bowman, William. Dr., University of Colorado INSTAAR
• Bradley, Raymond S. Prof., Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts
• Fagre, Daniel B. Dr., Ecologist/Global Change Research Coordinator, USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center
• Graumlich, Lisa. Prof., Big Sky Institute
• Hansen, Andrew J. Prof. Dr., Montana State University - Bozeman, Department of Ecology
• Hardy, Douglas. Dr., Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts
• Kang, Sinkyu. Dr., Numerical Terradynamics Simulation Group, School of Forestry University of Montana
• Malanson, George P. Dr., Department of Geography, University of Iowa
• Millar, Constance I. Dr., PSW Research Station, Albany
• Nechodom, Mark. Dr., Sierra Nevada Research Center - Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• Porter, Charles. Dr., Director of Patagonia Research Foundation, Maine
• Taylor, John. Dr. Head, Argonne Regional Climate Center, Illinois

Editor's note: The song you are trying to remember is "How are things in Glocca Mora" from the musical Finnian's Rainbow. I remember because Harry Stockwell, who I knew as a child, was in the road company. JAD.

New Edition of A World of Sciencec

A World of Science (October - December 2007)

CONTENTS Vol. 5 No. 4

IN FOCUS
p 2 - The rise of animals (Part I)

NEWS
p 9 - Water education comes to China's schools
p 10 - Mission rallies support for DRC's mountain gorillas
p 10 - Oman's Oryx Sanctuary dropped from World heritage List
p 11- UNESCO joins UN response to Peruvian earthquake
p 12 - A master plan for science and technology in Mongolia

INTERVIEW
p 13 -Robert Hepworth on why many of the world's most endangered species are migratory

HORIZON
p 16 - The day Mount Manaro stirred
p 21 - Mini-laboratories for the Middle East

IN BRIEF
p 24 - Diary
p 24 - New releases

From the editorial by Walter Erdelen, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences:

Although tragedies like the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina graphically demonstrated how indispensable geoscientific knowledge can be in mitigating natural disasters, geological knowledge benefits all of society all of the time because everything we cannot grow - all the power and raw materials on which society depends - comes from the Earth and therefore has to be 'unearthed' by geologists. With fewer students opting for geoscience courses, Earth scientists fear we may beheading for a collapse of geological educational infrastructure worldwide. This could happen because, by the time rising prices encourage further exploration, historically low student recruitment may have already led to the closure and dispersal of university departments. Given the central importance of Earth sciences for our future, this prospect should worry everyone.

Over the next 18 months, the International Year of Planet Earth - initiated jointly by UNESCO and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) - will be urging political leaders to act.

The Year will be officially launched at UNESCO headquarters on 12-13 February.On its list of things to do: reducing vulnerability to natural and human-induced hazards; improving understanding of the medical aspects of Earth science; discovering new natural resources and making them available in a sustainable manner; getting under Earth's living skin: soil; building safer structures and expanding urban areas by utilizing natural subsurface conditions; determining the non-human factor in climatechange; detecting deep and poorly accessible groundwater; and removing some of the question marks surrounding the evolution of life.