Jens Stoltenberg, Gordon Brown, Bill Gates, Robert Zoellick, Margaret Chan and other speakers will launch an initiative to save 10 Million mothers and newborns by 2015 - at a press conference at 10.30am on 25 September at the UN Headquarters.

This from the Norwegian Mission: Siri Gjortz (+1 646 642 9910)

UK Mission: Heather Pillans (+44 7795 656487) or Justin McKenzie Smith (917 282 0128)

World Bank: Phil Hay (+1 202 409 2909)

WORLD LEADERS LAUNCH A PLAN FOR SAVING 10 MILLION MOTHERS AND NEWBORNS BY 2015.

Today, a group of World Leaders will commit to actions aimed at saving 10 million mothers and newborns in the poorest countries by 2015.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway launched the first year Progress Report on the Global Campaign for Health. The Report demonstrates that increased investments in health - a doubling of health aid since 2000 - are having results. More than 2 million people are now receiving AIDS treatment, the rapid scale-up of effective malaria programmes is leading to dramatic reductions in child mortality and measles deaths have fallen by 68% since 1999.

But the Report also calls for urgent, effective international action to accelerate progress towards the UN goals of reducing maternal and child deaths by 2015. To save 3m mothers and 7m newborns - and meet these goals - an extra $2.4bn in 2009 rising to $7bn in 2015 will be needed.

Responding to this call, Heads of Governments and Health Agencies committed to mobilise international support for stronger health systems, including the training and recruitment of over 1 million health workers.

Specific pledges included an announcement by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown of nearly $1bn over the next 3 years to support national health plans in 8 countries, and a commitment from Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, to base teams of new, expert staff in Africa over the coming months to help some of the poorest countries to strengthen their health systems for better maternal, newborn and child health.

And, while these traditional investments in the health of the poor remain vital to tackling disease, helping developing countries to recruit and retain health workers, and build and develop their own health systems will require a new long-term approach to health financing. So today world leaders announced the establishment of a high-level Taskforce on Innovative Financing for Health Systems, to make recommendations to the Italian G8 Summit in 2009 on how innovative aid mechanisms can complement other sources of finance to deliver the extra resources that are needed.

An unprecedented coalition of partners has gathered in New York to support the Global Campaign’s call for urgent action. Summarising the range of events taking place, Margaret Chan pledged to keep the cause of mothers and children firmly at the top of the international development agenda and with development and civil society partners, rapidly scale up support for countries through the International Health Partnership to develop and finance comprehensive national health plans.

1)      Those at the press conference will incluse Prime Minister Stoltenberg (Norway), Prime Minister Brown (UK), Margaret Chan (Director-General, World Health Organisation), Robert Zoellick (President, World Bank), Bill Gates, Phillipe Douste-Blazy (UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Innovative Financing) and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul (Germany, UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on the review conference on Financing for Development).

2)      On 26 September 2007, in New York a group of world leaders will meet to launch the Global Campaign for the Health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Global Campaign aims to give renewed impetus to MDGs 4, 5 and 6. These MDGs focus on the urgent need to improve maternal, newborn and child health and to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

3)      The first year report of the Global Campaign includes individual and collective contributions from 14 heads of State/Government and 18 international leaders. The report provides an update of major activities during the last year, and highlights concrete actions that are required to accelerate the necessary progress if we are to reach the health related MDGs by 2015.

4)      The report demonstrates that investments in health are yielding results in terms of lives saved:

·       More than 2 million people are now receiving AIDS treatment. And, for the first time since the AIDS epidemic began, the number of people newly infected in a year has declined.

·       Malaria nets are being distributed much more rapidly leading to dramatic reductions in child mortality.
·       More vaccines are reaching more children than ever before.
·       Unprecedented financial commitments have been made. For instance, the US Government has pledged US$48 billion to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, while India this year has allocated US$3 billion to improve the health of the rural poor.

5)      But much more must be done. The Global Campaign is calling for an extra $2.4bn in 2009 rising to $7bn in 2015 to save 3m mothers and 7m newborns by 2015. This money will support stronger health systems, including over 1 million extra health workers, and the additional costs needed to ensure 400m extra births take place in a quality assured clinics. If delivered it will represent a 70% reduction in the death rate for mothers and babies and would ensure the achievement of both MDG4 and 5 for the majority of the poorest countries.

6)      These health systems are critical to ensuring that pregnant mothers and their newborn infants get the care they need, especially during complications in pregnancy. As part of the Global Campaign, the International Health Partnership (IHP) was launched to help improve the way donors support national health plans for health systems. 14 developing countries are members of the IHP and related initiatives (IHP+): Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia. These countries are preparing national plans (IHP Compacts) to build stronger health systems, including providing more health workers.

7)      The Taskforce for Innovative International Finance for Health Systems will help to mobilise the extra money that is needed to finance plans such as these. For example, Germany has supported a mechanism which offers debt cancellation linked to investments in the health sector. Other existing instruments include the French-led UNITAID, the results based financing trust fund and the international finance facility for immunisation.

8)      The Taskforce will be co-Chaired by Gordon Brown and Robert Zoellick and comprises 8 additional members:

·       President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia)
·       Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Norway)
·       Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Health Minister, Ethiopia)
·       Bernard Kouchner (Foreign Minister, France)
·       Guilio Tremonti (Finance Minister, Italy)
·       Heidemarie Wierczorek-Zeul (Development Minister, Germany)
·       Margaret Chan (Director-General of the World Health Organisation)
·       Graça Machel

Phillipe Douste-Blazy, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Innovative Financing will serve as a Special Adviser to the Taskforce.

9)      The Taskforce will convene up to 4 times over the next 12 months, with its first meeting at the Financing for Development Conference in Doha in November, and will report to the Italian G8 Summit in 2009. It will be supported by a Secretariat hosted by the World Bank and the WHO.

Bright side of the U.S. financial meltdown.

By TOM PLATE, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/eo20…
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Rather than curse the current financial darkness, let us try to light candles. Without blowing our credibility entirely, let us see if we can illuminate the brighter side of this global meltdown. Here is a trio of pluses to try on for size.

***

No. 1 is that the United States will probably now have to lecture the world a lot less on economic issues. How wonderful! That, at least, should reduce global rhetorical warming. Asia, in particular, deserves get a break from Uncle Know-It-All.

The American financial establishment, it seems, is now raising the same systemic questions about the financial practice of “shorting” companies and stocks as were raised by angry Asians during the Asian Financial Crisis. Then, even otherwise well-regulated economies and companies were attacked by Western hedge funds betting ravenously that currencies and stock prices in the region would fall.

The Asian argument was that such shorting (betting on downturns) can create self-fulfilling prophecies of lower stock and currency values. Back then, a smug America would not listen. But now that the tables have turned, the long and short of it is that the U.S. establishment is having Asian-like doubts.

Listen to what the head of Morgan Stanley, a frequent short-broker itself, said the other day about the effect of all the shorting of his own huge company: “There is no rational basis for the (downward) movement in our stock or credit-default spreads,” complained John Mack. “We’re in the midst of a market controlled by fear and rumors, and short-sellers are driving our stock down.”

Asians may be permitted to derive a measure of sad pleasure from the sight of a huge U.S. investment bank reeling from a dose of its own medicine.

***

A second quantum of solace will come when almost everyone realizes that the U.S. can no longer continue to shell out $2 billion a month for the Iraq War. “There is no such thing as a free war,” said the widely respected Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in a speech the other night in Los Angeles. “And this has been a particularly expensive war.”

Much of our Iraq War debt, which Stiglitz calculates is at least $3 trillion, has been financed by foreign investors, including China and Japan. That can’t continue much longer. Expect pressure to end the war to intensify. For those of us who never liked this war, the bottom line is this: the sooner the better.

***

The third arguable plus of this crisis is the renewed sense of the remaining relevance of U.S. economic vitality. Note that AIG, the insurance giant based in the U.S., is being saved by the Bush administration on the principle that AIG is too big to fail. That is to say: the crush of a potential avalanche of historic proportions, unlike the periodic light snowfall, is not worth risking if it can be prevented.

This makes logical sense: But here’s another entity that’s also too big to fail: the United States. Petty geopolitics aside, Asia has much more to lose than gain if the U.S. tanks. Asian governments and private investment institutions have socked a chunk of their collective life savings in various high-quality U.S. government investments. The totality of their commitment is awesome. If they panic and pull out now, while the market is down, they pull the rug out from under their sovereign strategic plans.

Asia knows that an unhealthy U.S. is bad medicine for everyone, including Asia. Asia’s goals are not to conqueror territory or impose values but rather to avoid poverty and to continue economic development. The region’s persistent pragmatism is a source of its strength.

Consider this summary observation from famed Princeton physicist and essayist Freeman Dyson: “The first decade of the twenty-first century has changed the world in a hopeful direction. In that decade, China and India decided that money is more important than ideology. It means that China and India, like Britain three hundred years earlier, will become rich countries. Asia, which is the center of gravity of the world population, will henceforth be rich rather than poor.”

That would happen eventually even if the U.S. were to disappear from the face of the earth. But it will take Asia much longer and the road will be much steeper without a vibrant U.S.

Perhaps Asia can take comfort in the axiom that at some point what falls down almost always gets back up on its feet again. This will be good for everybody.

Capitalism must be more regulated, says Sarkozy.
ELITSA VUCHEVA, The Euobserver, September 24, 2008

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, on Tuesday (23 September) {in his speech before the UN General Assembly in New York City} called for an international summit to tackle the global finance crisis and its consequences, saying that capitalism should be more “regulated.”

“Let us build a capitalism where ratings agencies will be subject to controls and punished when necessary, where transparency of transactions will replace opaqueness. The opaqueness is such today that we have difficulty understanding even what is happening,” Mr Sarkozy said in a speech to the UN General Assembly, Reuters reports.

Mr Sarkozy denounced “a crazy system which has been our system for years.” (Photo: United Nations)

“I am told ‘We don’t know who is responsible.’ Oh yeah? Well let me tell you that when things were going well, we knew who got bonuses. What a strange system,” he also told journalists, denouncing “a crazy system which has been our system for years.”

Mr Sarkozy hopes to see an international meeting to discuss the crisis, the worst the world has seen, he said, since the Great Depression.


***

“I’m convinced that it’s the duty of heads of state and government of the countries most directly concerned to meet before the end of the year to examine together the lessons of the most serious financial crisis the world has experienced since that of the 1930s,” Mr Sarkozy said before the UN General Assembly, in his first public statements on the financial crisis.

At a press conference later in the day, he said he was thinking of a G8-format summit in November, gathering the world’s eight leading economic powers – namely the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia, but also open to “emerging countries,” such as China, India, and Brazil.

Mr Sarkozy did not specify where the summit should take place, saying that it could be anywhere from Washington or New York, to London, Brussels and Paris.

***

More regulation:

Additionally, the French president suggested a general overhaul of the financial system should be considered, where capitalism would be more “regulated.”

“Let us rebuild together a regulated capitalism in which whole swathes of financial activity are not left to the sole judgment of market operators, in which banks do their job, which is to finance economic development rather than engage in speculation,” he was reported as saying by Deutsche Welle.

His comments come just a day after MEPs also called on the European Commission to come up with legislation plans to regulate the activities of hedge funds and private equity funds.

***

However, EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy told MEPs he did not believe it was “necessary at this stage to tar hedge funds and private equity with the same brush as we use for the regulated sector. The issues relating to the current turmoil are different.”

One should “analyse the impact of the existing EU provisions and of additional member states’ rules in this field before one embarks on introducing any new legislation,” said the commissioner.

***

EU-Russia economic space:

Separately, the EU president-in-office also suggested establishing “a common economic space that would unite Russia and Europe.”

“What Europe is telling Russia is that we want links with Russia, that we want to build a shared future with Russia, we want to be Russia’s partner,” Mr Sarkozy said.

According to him, the initiative for a common economic space would go “beyond the strategic partnership as thought of until now,” but would not aim to establish “a common market” either.

However, the French president also referred to Russia’s war with Georgia this summer and underlined that the EU “cannot compromise on the principal of sovereignty and independence of states.”

Chinese company wants to buy Brussels Airlines and its Airport.
VALENTINA POP, September 5, 2008.

Chinese airline Hainan may challenge a bid by Lufthansa to buy Brussels Airlines, with the Asian firm already in talks to snap up Belgium’s Charleroi airport.

German carrier Lufthansa remains the favourite bidder for Brussels Airlines, but some shareholders in the Belgian company believe the offer is too low and are looking at other partners, such as British Airways and Hainan, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday (5 September).

Late last week, Lufthansa said it was in “constructive negotiations” to acquire a 45 percent stake in Brussels Airlines for €65 million, expecting to close the deal within the next few weeks. The remaining stake was then to be taken over after two years.

But shareholders in Brussels Airlines believe the carrier is worth at least €200 million. Brussels Airlines is the heir to the bankrupt Sabena, with a 30 percent share having been taken over in 2006 by Richard Branson’s Virgin Express.

Hainan’s interest in Brussels Airlines is fortified by its bid for Charleroi airport, a low-cost hub 46 km south of the Belgian capital.

Hainan is among the three companies shortlisted to buy up the currently publicly owned Charleroi airport, with the Chinese company saying it is one of their priorities and promising further developments of the low cost terminal, La Libre Belgique reported on Tuesday.

The move has sparked internal competition between Charleroi and the main Brussels airport, Zaventem, out of which Hainan operates a number of flights. Unidentified sources close to the deal told the Belgian newspaper that the managers of Zaventem had launched a “sabotage and denigration campaign” of Charleroi airport, in order to distract the Chinese.

La Libre Belgique also reported that the Flemish region and the Brussels Airport Company (BAC) who manages Zaventem gave Hainan Airlines financial advantages worth €1.5 million.

The newspaper draws a comparison with the aid offered by the Charleroi airport and the Walloon region to the Irish carrier Ryanair, aid deemed illegal by the European Commission in 2004.

After having read the newspaper report, the Walloon minister for transportation, Andre Antoine, said: “Nobody is stupid. The aim of the manoeuvre is to attract the Chinese to Zaventem, not Charleroi.”

Zaventem is Brussel’s main international airport.

In return, BAC said it didn’t understand the minister’s reaction and didn’t see any problems with the €1.5 million contract it signed two years ago with the Chinese company, in order to promote the Flemish region in Shanghai and Beijing. The contract does not involve directly neither BAC, nor Hainan Airlines, a press spokesman for BAC said.

La Libre Belgique reported that the contract involved some €400,000 being payed to Hainan for “marketing support” and €200,000 for language training for the pilots of the company. Only €900,000 were allocated to promoting the region in China, the newspaper says.

———————-

[Comment / Opinion on EUobserver] After Georgia: is Ukraine next?
ANDREW WILSON, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, September 5, 2008.

EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - The war in Georgia began by exposing the security vacuum in the surrounding region. Now it has claimed its first collateral victim, after the fall of the Ukrainian government on 2 September.

The crisis has been brewing over the summer recess, but came to a head in late August after President Yushchenko’s administration accused Prime Minister Tymoshenko of trading her relative silence over Georgia for Russian support in a campaign to supplant him as president.

Ukraine president Viktor Yushchenko - the 2004 Orange Revolution feels a long time ago (Photo: timoshenko.com.ua)

When parliament reassembled, Tymoshenko joined forces with the east Ukrainian-based Party of Regions, ramming through a law to reduce presidential power, and apparently repositioning herself as a more pro-Russian candidate in the presidential race.

Parliament was also unable to agree any of several diametrically opposed resolutions on Georgia, ranging from outright condemnation of Russia to recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The crisis comes in between the emergency EU summit on Russia-Georgia in Brussels on 1 September and the regular EU-Ukraine summit on 9 September in Evian, France.

The EU therefore has an ideal opportunity to push back against Russia’s attempts to dominate the European neighbourhood by starting with Ukraine, which is also the linchpin for the whole region.

***

War of words:

Many Ukrainians now hear domestic echoes of the lead-up to war in Georgia. Ukraine has its own potentially separatist region in Crimea, and the country’s Russian minority numbers some 8.3 million (the largest minority in Europe).

Half of Ukraine’s population of just over 46 million are Russian-speaking in various degrees. Although the Ukrainian constitution bans dual citizenship, the government has launched an inquiry into alleged covert Russian passport-holding in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.

Some Ukrainians note that Russia justified its invasion of Georgia, as the Nazis once justified their dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as being necessary to “protect” a minority to whom they had just given citizenship.

Russia has begun a war of words over Ukraine’s alleged supply of arms to Georgia. And the conflict itself has shown that the Russian Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, can operate with impunity, whether Ukraine likes it or not.

Based on its analysis of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” as a foreign-backed “NGO coup,” Russia has also been quietly building its own network of Russia-friendly NGOs in Ukraine since 2004.

Ukrainians also talk of an otkat ekonomiya (”kickback economy”), in which Russian money percolates throughout the Ukrainian elite.

***

A strategy for Ukraine:

What should the EU therefore offer in Evian? The European Neighborhood Policy is a worthy enough technical process, but it does not address pressing political concerns about maintaining and securing Ukraine’s independence.

Many member states will worry about leaping straight to the contentious issue of ultimate membership for Ukraine, but the EU already recognizes Ukraine’s theoretical right to join once it has met the Copenhagen criteria; and it cannot be beyond EU leaders’ verbal dexterity to play up the prospect.

What Ukraine would value and needs most is a real sense that it is being treated distinctly in its own right. The key words are “association” and “partnership,” in whatever order or combination.

The EU has greater scope for short-term measures, which should be designed to deliver a multi-dimensional solidarity strategy for Ukraine.

The EU’s foreign ministers should invite their Ukrainian counterpart to give a briefing on Ukraine-Russia relations at their next meeting.

Ukraine should be offered a road map for visa-free travel, as well as ensuring that member states deliver on current visa facilitation measures. The new EU-Ukraine agreement should include a beefed-up solidarity clause, building on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, whereby the EU would consult and assist Ukraine in case of challenges to its territorial integrity and sovereignty. And the EU should back Ukraine if it insists that the Russian Black Sea Fleet leaves on schedule in 2017.

The EU should also launch a comprehensive study of all aspects of Europe’s reliance on Russian energy supplies, including transit, energy security and conservation, supply diversification, and the impact of “bypass” pipelines like Nordstream and South Stream.

It should consider linking the opening of the Nordstream pipeline, which would allow Russia to cut off gas to Poland and Ukraine while maintaining deliveries to Germany, to the opening of the proposed “White Stream” pipeline to bring gas from Azerbaijan directly to Ukraine via Georgia, bypassing Russia.

The EU could even play a part in keeping the 2012 European Championship football finals on track. The decision to appoint Ukraine and Poland as co-hosts was a powerful symbol of European unity across the current EU border (Poland is a member, Ukraine is not).

UEFA is unhappy with Ukraine’s progress in building the necessary infrastructure, but Ukraine should be given time to get its act together.

Where appropriate, the EU should extend these measures to Moldova, which is now calling Ukraine a “strategic shelter,” most probably after the elections in March 2009.

Ukraine faces a crucial presidential election in 2009 or 2010. After getting its fingers badly burned at the last election in 2004, Russia is clearly tempted to intervene again. The “Russian factor” will strongly influence the campaign.

Greater Western engagement is needed to ensure that the “Europe factor” is equally prominent.

UNEP NEWS RELEASE - 2008/31

World Heritage Push for Garden of Eden: Italy Backs Bid to List Iraqi Marshlands Following Completion Of UNEP Restoration Project.

KYOTO/NAIROBI, 5 September 2008–A plan to list as a World Heritage Site an
area known as the Fertile Crescent, and thought by some to be the location
of the Biblical “Garden of Eden”, was unveiled today by the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) in cooperation with the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The initiative, to be supported by funding from the Government of Italy,
aims to further the protection and conservation of a significant wetland of
global cultural, natural and environmental importance.

The Marshlands, spawning grounds for Gulf fisheries and home to species
like the Sacred Ibis, were almost totally drained and destroyed by the
former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1990s and early 21st
century.

Dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which feed the fabled
area, had also aggravated the decline. By 2002 the 9,000 square km of
permanent wetlands had dwindled to just 760 square km.

UNEP estimated then that these wetlands would be completely lost within
three to five years unless urgent action was taken.

The World Heritage management support plan, announced at the end of a
meeting in Kyoto, follows a four-year, $14 million UNEP project to restore
the ecological viability of the site, while bringing sustainable
livelihoods to the Marsh Arabs.

***

The Marsh Arabs, the 5,000 year-old heirs of the Babylonians and the
Sumerians, and their wetland home had been targeted by the former Iraqi
Government forcing an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 into exile or camps in
and outside Iraq.

With the collapse of the Saddam Hussein Government in mid-2003, local
residents began breaking the drainage embankments and opening the
floodgates to bring water back into the marshlands.,

The UNEP marshland management project, which commenced in 2004 with funding
from the UN Iraq Trust Fund, the Government of Japan and the Government of
Italy, has been working with the Iraqi Environment Ministry and local
communities to accelerate improvements.

These include environmentally-friendly methods that are providing safe
drinking water for up to 22,000 people, the planting of reed banks and beds
as natural pollution and sewage filters and the introduction of renewable
energies such as solar.

A Marshland Information Network has been established. Training in
satellite and field monitoring and wetland restoration and management has
also been part of project which today completed its final evaluation phase
at the Kyoto meeting.

During this meeting, the Iraqi Ministry of Environment also requested UNEP
to provide support for accession to multilateral environmental agreements
(MEAs) in order to take part in the international environmental challenges
but also opportunities facing the planet.

MEAs range from the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal
Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Convention of
Migratory Species and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Narmin Othman, the Iraqi Environment Minister who is in Japan for the
event, said: “I am very happy that we are now going to work towards making
the Marshlands a National Park and a globally important World Heritage
Site.”

“Because of what Saddam Hussein did, the marshlands were in danger of
completely disappearing as was the centuries-old culture of the Marsh
Arabs. It had become an ecological but also a human tragedy”, she said.

“Now we have 50 to 60 per cent of the marshlands back we can look forward
to further improvements and putting them on the map as Iraq’s first mixed,
natural and cultural World Heritage Site as befits an area of global
significance”, added Minister Othman.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director,
said: “I would like to thank the Governments of Japan and Italy for their
support and congratulate the Iraqi people on these extraordinary
achievements.”

“The work in the Iraqi marshlands may have been unique and challenging for
a whole variety of reasons. But the lessons we have learnt go beyond
Iraq’s border. They provide a blue print for the restoration for the many
other damaged, degraded and economically-important wetland ecosystems
across the world”, he added.

***

Mr. Steiner said he looked forward to working with the Iraqi Government and
cooperating with UNESCO on developing a comprehensive management plan en
route to securing a World Heritage Site listing and thanked the Government
of Italy for its invaluable support.

Chizuru Aoki of UNEP’s International Environmental Technology Centre (IETC)
in Japan, which has been coordinating the project, said today that the
Italian funds would be used to draw up and implement a sustainable
preservation and management plan.

This will include pilot projects on community-wide ecosystem management and
cultural preservation as well as capacity building, jointly with UNESCO and
the Iraqi authorities.

According to UNESCO, the earliest that Iraq could envisage a submission to
the World Heritage Committee might be 2010 which, if approved could see the
Marshlands of Mesopotamia listed as World Heritage in 2011.

“It is essential that we continue to work with the Iraqi partners, UNESCO,
as well as other relevant organizations to help Iraq move towards this
goal”, Ms. Aoki said.

***

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

The Iraqi Marshland Project:  http://marshlands.unep.or.jp/

UNEP’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch Iraq Reports:
 http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications…

Downloadable maps and images at www.unep.org?

For more information, please contact: Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and
Head of Media, +41-79-596-5737 or +254-733-632755, or
 nick.nuttall at unep.org”,

Yukio Yoshii, Senior Liaison Officer, UNEP International Environmental
Technology Centre, +81-6-915-4591, or  yukio.yoshii at unep.or.jp

Habib El-Habr, Director and Regional Representative, UNEP Regional Office
for West Asia, +973-178-12-777, or  habib.elhabr at unep.org.bh.

***********************************
Jim Sniffen
Programme Officer
UN Environment Programme
New York
tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210
 info at nyo.unep.org
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From the IPCC Meeting in Geneva:

Mr. Rajendra Pachauri, has been reelected by acclamation this morning for a second term.

Mr. Pachauri will meet the press on Thursday following the closure of the Plenary at 13.00, at the CICG in Geneva.

He will then introduce the new Bureau members and provide information on other major items concerning the future IPCC work program.

The Chairman will only be available for interviews on that occasion.

Please see Press release attached.

With best wishes,

Brenda Abrar-Milani
IPCC information and communication Office
World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
7 bis, avenue de la Paix
CH-1211 Geneva 2
Switzerland
Tel. +4122 730 8066
Email:  babrar at wmo.int
Web: www.ipcc.ch

————————————————-

PRESS RELEASE
Tuesday September 2, 2008.
The IPCC is happy to announce that its Chairman, Mr. Rajendra Pachauri, has been reelected by acclamation this morning for a second term.

Mr. Pachauri has been the head of the organization since 2002. Under his leadership, the IPCC released “Climate Change 2007”, its Fourth Assessment Report, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is holding its 29th Plenary session in Geneva until Thursday 4 September.

All other agenda items under discussion, including the election of the other Bureau members, are still in progress. The new team elected by all member countries will lead the IPCC through the preparation of the Fifth Assessment Report, which is expected to be released in 2014.

Mr. Pachauri will meet the press on Thursday following the closure of the Plenary at 13.00, at the CICG in Geneva. He will then introduce the new Bureau members and provide information on other major items concerning the future IPCC work program.

The Chairman will only be available for interviews on that occasion.
Contact :
Brenda Abrar-Milani :  babrar at wmo.int Tel: +33 614 81 73 98/ IPCC website : www.ipcc.ch