Uniting
Conservation, Communities and Sustainable Travel
Message
on the occasion of World Environment Day
World Environment Day:
Each
year, World Environment Day provides
us with an opportunity to consider
the environment in which we live –
the air we breathe, the water we
drink, the land we occupy, cultivate
and enjoy. The environment provides
us with a quality of life which is
often taken for granted. It shapes
our culture and traditions; we are,
ultimately, a product of our
environment.
World Environment Day 2006 is
devoted to the theme “Don’t desert
drylands”. Drylands constitute some
of the world’s largest land reserves
in terms of both size and natural
resources, amounting to 3.6 billion
hectares, or one quarter of the
world’s total land area. Yet,
through climate change and human
pressures these drylands are
increasingly under threat. World
Environment Day this year seeks to
raise public awareness of this
problem and share effective measures
of responding to it. The event
forms, as such, an important
complement to the activities
organized under the United Nations
‘International Year of Deserts and
Desertification’, which will be
celebrated throughout 2006.
Drylands are valuable ecosystems in
their own right. Often considered
the most barren and inhospitable
places on Earth, deserts are in fact
areas rich with highly specialized
fauna and flora, unique for their
capacity to survive extreme
conditions. Dryland communities are
likewise distinctive. One only has
to think of the Touareg in Algeria
or the Masai in Kenya to appreciate
the resourceful ways in which these
communities have coped with adverse
environmental conditions over
centuries, if not millennia, living
in harmony with their environment
and developing remarkable means of
adaptation.
In its efforts to promote the
preservation and sustainable
management of the world’s drylands,
UNESCO has sought to work closely
with local traditions. The current
UNESCO project on the “Sustainable
Management of Marginal Drylands”
uses community-based approaches to
rehabilitate dryland areas in China,
Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Jordan, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia and
Uzbekistan. World Environment Day
offers an occasion to celebrate the
value of such approaches, and to
explore their potential for
combating desertification.
For UNESCO, World Environment Day
also provides an opportunity to
highlight the powerful role that
education can play in addressing
issues of dryland conservation and
rehabilitation. Under the aegis of
the United Nations Decade of
Education for Sustainable
Development (2005-2014), UNESCO is
developing a new education kit,
aimed at using art as a means to
discover and protect the desert
environment. Such kits have in the
past proved extremely successful,
and are now widely used across
dryland areas to inform teachers and
pupils of the causes, consequences
and means of tackling
desertification. These and other
such innovative methods will be
discussed at the forthcoming
international conference on “The
Future of Drylands” (Tunis, 19-21
June 2006) organized by UNESCO.
The purpose of
World Environment Day 2006 is to
help ensure that drylands do,
indeed, have a future. The
preservation of drylands and the
wealth of natural and human
resources to which they are home is
a long-term process that requires
the sustained commitment of the
international community. Our shared
task is to ensure that drylands
continue to be places where flora,
fauna and people can live and
flourish.
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