The devastating typhoon in Myanmar and the terrible earthquake in China for example both destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives as well as uprooting huge amount of fauna and flora and damaging key habititats, further threatening biodiversity.
We at the GEF of course felt compelled to do what we could to help mitigate this suffering and help people begin the painful but necessary process of rebuilding. Further to that goal I would like to share with you that for the first time in the history of our biodiversity projects, we designed an emergency project to assess the damage to biodiversity inflicted by the quake with the idea of helping the local population deal with their immediate needs after this natural disaster.This effort not only include measures to rehabilitate the habitat of the brand animal of the Chinese Szechuan province, the Panda, but will also help further highlight how we can mainstream biodiversity issues into government disaster recovery planning. Along with our programming efforts, I would like to share with you details of some important gatherings we participated in over this past spring.
The spring Council meeting in April was again an essential event with lots of important discussions and key decisions made. For the GEF secretariat it is an extremely helpful exercise to present work plans, meet with NGOs and get feedback, guidance and approvals from council members. In Bonn during May-June, the Biodiversity COP-9, the UNFCCC meeting on Climate Change and the second board meeting of the Adaptation Fund were held, and we were active participants helping to push forward our mission of investing locally for global environmental benefits.
After Bonn,
I had the wonderful opportunity to make my first trip to the Central Asian region where I had the chance to meet with our partners in capitals and in the field. Making this trip was very important for me because I wanted to strengthen our GEF relationship with key stakeholders in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
Back in Washington I also had the priveledge to participate with our World Bank Group partners on a signature event called “Save the Tiger” at the Smithsonian Zoo here in Washington DC. Joined by WBG President Robert Zoellick the GEF participated in a full day of events with representatives of the international community, industry and NGOs to launch a “Tiger Coalition” designed to spread awareness of this majestic endangered species and the ongoing encroachment of its habitat by development.. As an “umbrella” species at the top of the food chain in the wild, tigers represent an important indicator of the status of wildlife and the balance of biodiversity. Building on awareness with this tiger we hope to also garner interest and support with other public-private partners to save other threatened species and I encourage you to watch this space for more details in this area.
Before closing this letter, I encourage you visit the latest updates we have made to our website at www.thegef.org. We’ve added a multimedia and a publications section and did some other small changes that hopefully will make our website more interesting. However we are working on revamping the GEF website to offer you an interactive and user-friendly tool. For this reason I encourage you to browse the pages and offer us feedback on how we can make further improvements.
In the meantime, have a restful summer.
Best wishes,
Monique Barbut CEO and Chairperson
Global Environment Facility
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