UAE Initiative: Dubai to hold art competition

UAE

Initiative: Dubai to hold art competition

The Dubai Municipality Environment Department will hold a competition titled 'Healthy wetlands... Healthy people".

It will be open for children aged 5-18 years and two winning entries will be displayed at the 10th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Convention on Wetlands, to be held in South Korea from October 28 to November 4.

Mohammad Abdul Rahman Hassan, head of Marine Environment and Wildlife Section, said the competition allowed one entry per person.

http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Environment/10251638.html

Sammy's rescuer speaks out: I'm stuck in the middle

Whether Sammy stays in the Atlantis tank is not his immediate concern but the artificial environment could offer the world's biggest fish a good home, said Hamed Al Rahoomy, an Emirati fishermen and previously chairman of the Fishermen's Association.

Annually, one or two whale sharks are caught accidentally or found by fishermen dead from boat collisions, said Rahoomy, adding that having one in a tank is a good means of educating the public and fishermen on the gentle fish.

"I am working for Atlantis to collect all the fish for the aquarium," he said. Rahoomy said the Atlantis resort had not placed an order for a whale shark and refused to disclose the amount of money they may have paid for her. "Some fishermen were surprised it was put in the tank with other fish. They don't know it doesn't eat other fish. We need education, it can help other whale sharks," he said.

Ali Bin Saqer Al Suwaidi, chairman of the Emirates Marine Environment Group based in Ghantoot which works on environmental education projects is adamant the whale shark should be tagged and released.

"When you catch them you tag them and release them. We have signed CITES and we should take it into consideration," he told Gulf News.

After more than a month in an aquarium with qualified team looking after the whale shark, Sammy should be well enough now to be released and have recovered from the distress it was apparently in. According to Al Suwaidi, Atlantis has up to eight tags for future plans to monitor certain species.

Al Suwaidi added that fishermen know very well which fish can and cannot be caught. "They know the endangered species. Our grandfathers would catch them to use the oil from their skins on their boats, but not anymore!"

According to Rahoomy the whale shark ran into some trouble in shallow waters around a breakwater in Jebel Ali making it very difficult for it to find its way back to sea. "We know about dolphins, turtles, dugongs and all these animals and we don't catch them but there is nothing in the law about whale sharks," he said.

"Normally we don't catch this fish, we don't go fishing for it, it has little value," he said, "I have a fishing permit and whether I bring fish dead or alive to sell, it's the same thing, but this is not fishing because we gave it to the Atlantis to look after it."

http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Environment/10251644.html

Photographers urged to raise awareness

This photo competition is co-sponsored by Dubai Municipality in association with Canon.

It focuses on environmental protection and is open to all nationalities. The closing date for submission of entries is October 31.

Clean-up

Myrna Anderson, President of LFPG, said: "We are inspired ... to promote environmental awareness through photography.

"Dubai Municipality always gives their unstinting support to our yearly clean-up campaign by assigning the location within Dubai where we can conduct the clean up. In addition, they provide all the supplies required by our participants such as light snacks, T-shirts, gloves and garbage bags."

Hassan Mohammad Makki, Director of the Waste Management Department at Dubai Municipality said: "The results of their [LFPG] work gives a clear picture of environmental problems we have. It also enhances environmental awareness and encourages public participation."

Makki believes that through this event, participants find time to look at and think about what is really happening to our surroundings.

"Let us do our share in helping Dubai achieve its vision," he said.

The competition is open to all amateur photographers in the UAE and photos, film or digital, must be taken within the UAE.

An entry/registration fee of Dh50 per photo will be collected. This serves as invitation to the participant to attend the awards night photo competition and exhibition.

Submission of entries will be from October 24 and 31, from 3pm to 5pm, at Caravan Restaurant in the Hamarain Centre, Deira. Cash prizes and gift vouchers of up to Dh15,000 await this year's winners.

The final judging and gala night will be on November 28 at Sheraton Deira Hotel, Dubai. For more information, call Myrna Anderson on 050-7654343 or visit www.lightform.ae.

http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Environment/10251623.html

Lebanon

From a science lab to a waste dump: EU funds multiple initiatives in Baalbek region

The facility contains everything that one would expect to find in a modern science lab: chemicals for experiments locked behind clean glass-doored cabinets, body-part models to study the human anatomy, a large table with tubes and beakers for chemistry and physics experiments, and tables arranged so that every student can easily see what the teacher writes on the blackboard. Only the gas for the Bunsen burners is still missing.

But Hajj was not opening his school for his students, who are normally out of class on Fridays. Rather, he and his colleges welcomed the people who made the modern laboratory - as well as a recreation room equipped with musical instruments and a new generator - possible. Patrick Laurent, head of the European Commission delegation to Lebanon, accompanied by staff members and journalists, personally visited Al-Qastal and other EU-financed project sites.

Al-Qastal, as well as the Tiberias Primary School next-door, are both beneficiaries of a 15-million euro ($20 million) project financed by the European Union as part of implementing the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.

The main goal of the project, run by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) in several different camps, is to enhance the employment opportunities of Palestinians living in Lebanon and to equip young Palestinians with the necessary skills to find employment. Creating "equal opportunities" for Palestinians is the key element of the work, one of the project managers explained.

Another important goal of the project is to improve education for students with special needs, who are in danger of dropping out of school. The funds allow disadvantaged students to have the opportunity to be taught one-on-one or in small groups by specially trained teachers.

"It should be everyone's mission to provide opportunities for adults with development disabilities to grow to the best of their ability through education, employment and community integration," reads a cardboard sign posted in one of the classrooms.

Education also plays an important role in the second project Laurent visited: Since 2006, the European Commission has financed a project to improve reproductive health and wellbeing in six Palestinian refugee camps, targeting mainly youths between the ages of 10 and 24.

"We noticed a large gap between the actual cultural values here and the actual behavior of the youth," Marta Petagne, project manager told reporters.

"This gap leads to further problems for the youth, because they don't talk to their parents about these sensitive issues," she added.

"Talking about sex is a big taboo," explained Hisham, one of the project's fieldworkers at the Chatila Palestinian refugee camp. "And when the kids don't know what the problem is, they probably make mistakes." 

The sexual education classes are conducted in teaching peer groups that include parents and  deal with issues concerning sexuality, drugs and other societal matters.

The classes use the Moving Forward board game in which between four and six players have to move their "youngster" from childhood through a host of challenges until finally reaching adulthood. On the way, the players have to answer questions from cards asked by the game's moderator.

"Define the word 'respect,'" one of the players was asked during a small demonstration of the game to the ambassador.

"I profited a lot from the game because it deals with problems of society like drugs," said Ali, one of the students. "But the most important thing is that we talk about these issues with each other, among the players."

Moving Forward has so far been adopted by 32 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, Petagne said. A Finnish group is working on introducing changes to the game to make it suitable for Kenyan society.

Three NGOs, the Lebanese Family Planning Association, the National Institute for Social Care and Vocational Training and the Italian Ricerca e Cooperazione, are involved in the 1.84 million euro project.

Another important accomplishment of the project was the creation of Young Person Advisory Centers in four of the camps to provide basic health and consulting services to young refugees.

"These centers are something very new, because they specifically target the youth," Petagne said.  "There's always a psychologist and a social worker present at centers."

The project also saw the creation of a Web site, www.wellteens.org, where youth can anonymously ask questions concerning relationships, puberty and reproductive health.

Another initiative that is being carried out in Baalbek with the EU funds is a waste-management project.

"Due to the difficulties of administrative reform in Lebanon, we were looking for a way to use our funds to help the needs of population," Joseph Piazza d'Olmo, program manager, told The Daily Star.

"We found two ways," he added. "The first one was local development, the second one waste management."

Although the Lebanese government is aware of the waste management problem and the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) has conducted studies aimed at solving it, the implementation of such projects has been difficult. Local authorities have remained skeptical of government proposals on waste management.

"This is why we used a different approach," Piazza d'Olmo said. "We asked the local authorities to make proposals themselves, and not just for themselves, but in cooperation with other municipal authorities."

Two calls for proposals received many responses, Piazza d'Olmo said. He added that 17 of the proposals have been selected for a grant with a budget of about 14 million euros and will soon be implemented.

One of the proposals is to build a new site where the municipalities of Baalbek can get rid of their waste. The site, located far outside populated areas in a former Syrian military zone, will serve about 100,000 people from 15 municipalities.

Piazza d'Olmo saluted the way the Environment Ministry, the CDR and the various project managers had cooperated on the EU-funded projects. "This demonstrated that ministries can work together," he said.

It is difficult to talk about a special identity of Arab environmental media in the same way as one may talk, for example, about an identity relevant to Arab political, cultural, economic, or sports media. An information identity requires some fundamental conditions to be considered autonomous and genuine. One such condition is the existence of professional patterns concerning varieties of news collection, presentation and analysis based on a particular theoretical framework pertaining to environmental issues. Another condition is the existence of a nucleus of media professionals who are well-trained and dedicated to the environment, and capable of influencing public orientations. A further condition has to do with continuity as contrasted to sparse news and irregular comments. Indeed, all these conditions are absent in the case of most Arab media when they deal with environmental topics. The problem of Arab environmental information may be related to a larger problem concerning Arab science journalism, which is still marginal in Arab media.

Although the occurrence of the term "environment" and its derivatives has increased thousands of times in Arab media during the last decade, the tackling of environmental issues has, in most cases, been limited to mere news and instantaneous reactions to world events, mainly catastrophes. Major international conferences on environment and development, since the Earth Summit in 1992 with the participation of Arab countries in it and their signing of almost all the ensuing treaties of international character, have contributed to motivating the Arab media to discuss environmental issues at length. However, this interest has been mostly exhibited in quoting bits and pieces of news exactly as transmitted by foreign news agencies. It is observed that most Arab media are satisfied in conveying addresses, often too general in character, of government officials during the opening of conferences and meetings on the environment, while they neglect what is offered by experts, which, alas, is at the heart of the matter.

A study concerning media coverage of environmental issues in Bahrain found that, despite the appearance in the six dailies of the country during 2004 of over 2000 articles on local environment issues, most of them constituted mere news and interviews, while only 4 percent were reports, news analyses and comments.

What this study of Bahrain has revealed applies to all the Arab countries covered by a survey of the leading Arab environmental monthly Al-Bia Wal-Tanmia (Environment and Development), which has come out with the following remarks:

1. Less than 10 percent of the Arab press has a full-time editor specialized in issues concerning environment and sustainable development. A similar percentage of this press designates a weekly page or a regular corner for environmental issues.

2. Even publications which assign a page for environmental topics withdraw this under the pressure of political or economic events or increasing advertising bookings. Such a withdrawal might be permanent or limited to months or even years, a measure never to be seen in political, economic, athletic or social pages of the same publication.

3. Many environment pages in the Arab press receive financial support from government organizations, like ministries of environment, a practice depriving this press of its neutrality and rendering it practically incapable of criticizing these organizations. The environment page of Al-Ahram, the leading Egyptian daily, dedicated in its issue of June 1, 2008, four reports featuring the environment minister, out of five. 

4. With the exception of Al-Bia Wal-Tanmia, published in Beirut since 1996, no other pan-Arab magazine which is specialized in the subject of the environment could achieve the status of a mainstream publication, distributed on a large scale throughout the Arab world, and which can be bought from newsstands that sell common interest publications.

5. Reliable sources of information

on the environment are still weak or non-existent on the local level. This explains why some articles on the environment in the Arab press lack the strength of information, which is the basis of modern journalism.

6. The percentage of environmental issues in reports, interviews, and debates on Arab television channels is under 1 percent, while they reach 10 percent on channels in many European countries.

7. A boom has been witnessed during the last five years in the number of Arab environmental Web sites, although it is still incomparable with what exists in developed countries and even in most third world countries. The content of these sites is still trivial; and the information that they offer is mostly old, non-documented and inappropriate for referential use even when these sites are run by governments. We have noticed that the content of most Arab Web sites on the environment is published as raw material, lacking scrutiny and editing. While some of these sites are serious and open to improvement, the major deficiency of all the Arab environmental sites is their lack of interaction with the public and the paucity of users reflected in the scantiness of comments, and failure to attract "chatters."

8. Environmental titles that have gained primal concern in Arab media are related to general topics like nature, wildlife, solid wastes, environmental health, marine pollution, and disasters. Industrial pollution and desertification have acquired priority in Algerian media, whereas the subject of water has been brought to the fore in Oman and Jordan. What is highly remarkable is the quasi-absence of topics like air pollution (except in catastrophic cases), efficient use of energy and land, and town-planning.

9. The simultaneity between the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the occurrence of natural calamities and extreme weather conditions in several Arab regions raised the preoccupation of Arab media in 2007 with the issue of climate change. This concern was augmented after hurricane Gonu hit Oman by the middle of that year, followed by floods in Mauritania, and the hurricane in Yemen in 2008.

Blame cannot be put only on the media for failing to produce the sort of information which can effectively tackle the problems of environment and sustainable development. Three interrelated elements are at play here: (1) official development plans and environmental programs; (2) a base of environmental scientific studies; and (3) a large public comprising millions of citizens who need to know about the environment and get involved in environmental and developmental action.

Environmental information ties these elements together. Besides supplying news on them, it participates in supporting sound environmental measures. Furthermore, far from being an autonomous variety of information open to amateurship, environmental information is a professional brand sharing the precise characteristics of information in general.

Modern information takes its starting point from the public that it addresses. It depends for continuity on its success in drawing the attention of this public and obtaining its support. Failing to achieve this is equivalent to putting oneself at once outside the market. Arab information on the environment is still a newcomer to the scene. Undoubtedly, it has recognized the significance of the environmental element for development; and its interest in environmental issues has been clearly and increasingly reflected in the media. What is still lacking, however, is to transform the headlines into serious articles and convert the environmental press toward professionalism.