INTERNATIONAL CO-ORDINATING
COUNCIL OF THE MAN AND THE BIOSPHERE (MAB) PROGRAMME MEETS IN PARIS
Paris, November 6 (No.2000-110)-
The International Co-ordinating Council of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere
Programme (MAB) today opened its 16th session which will notably focus on ways
to reinforce the biosphere network’s contribution to a global strategy of
sustainable development adopted in Seville (Spain) five years ago.
The Co-ordinating Council’s
5-day meeting at UNESCO Headquarters was opened by the Organization’s
Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura who highlighted the importance of the MAB
Programme and its World Network of Biosphere Reserves which numbers 368 sites in
ninety-one countries covering a surface area of over two million square
kilometres.
The Co-ordinating Council,
composed of representatives of thirty-four elected Member States, meets every
two years to oversee and review the interdisciplinary MAB Programme of research
and training. Seeking to conserve the planet’s biodiversity, the Programme
promotes the rational use and conservation of the resources of the biosphere,
and helps improve the global relationship between people and the environment.
Looking at the future, Mr
Matsuura declared that “in the natural sciences domain, we [UNESCO] are to
concentrate notably on water resources and ecosystems [and] the MAB Programme is
expected to play a key role in this respect.”
Mr Matsuura welcomed the
decision to consider ways to “reinforce the use of biosphere reserves and
their Network as key sites for sustainable development” and to “use reserves
for conservation, research and education”. He welcomed opportunities to
reinforce interdisciplinary activities, notably in promoting traditional
ecological knowledge, as recommended by the World Conference on Science
(Budapest, 1999). “We have important tasks to complete,” Mr Matsuura
declared, “to ensure that the world’s environmental problems are better
understood and practical solutions found.”
A major new departure for the
MAB Programme to be considered at the meeting is the possibility of establishing
reserves in urban and peri-urban areas. Whereas biosphere reserves have usually
been associated with pristine, scarcely populated environments, the inclusion of
urban areas will be considered within the strategy of emphasising sustainable
development objectives and in the light of regional, conservation and
development concerns. A limited number of Biosphere Reserves have already been
set up outside major cities in Brazil, Costa Rica, Morocco and Spain.
The meeting is also to consider
the possibility of creating a Geopark Programme for selected sites which
integrate the preservation of extraordinary examples of geological heritage in a
strategy of regional economic development.
Other items on the agenda of
the meeting include: national reports, a review of biosphere reserves designated
over ten years ago, recommendations for the implementation of the Seville
Strategy (on ways to reinforce the role of MAB reserves in developing a new
vision of the relationship between conservation and development), and
consideration of future developments of the MAB Programme.
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