This July, Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe will host the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties (COP15) to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, named after the Iranian city where the treaty was first signed in 1971. Dr Musonda Mumba is Ramsar's Secretary General. The influential Zambian-born environmentalist has over 25 years of global experience in environmental management and sustainable development, and is founder of the Network of African Women Environmentalists (NAWE).
Dr Mumba spoke to Unite for Nature about the progress Ramsar has made recently and what she hopes to see from COP15.
What were the key outcomes of COP14 and what issues have emerged since?
One of the key resolutions was related to synergies. How do we partner7 How do we work with different stakeholders more strategically7 Also, for the first time in the history of our convention we had a resolution on youth and wetlands - how to get more youth engagement with our convention.
Many of the resolutions related to our core business, the science. Since then there's been additional investments in, for example, the capacity to conduct wetland inventories,which is fantastic - we can't talk about what we don't know. Thanks to funding from governments in Belgium and Norway, we are now working with the UN to train a lot more countries in how to do this.