The Ramsar Convention Manual.pdf

A Guide to the Convention on Wetlands, (Ramsar, Iran, 1971)
Foreword to the 3 rd English edition
w
hen the Ramsar Manual-was first compiled by T. J. Davis and published in 1994, it was enthusiastically welcomed as
an essential vade mecum through the sometimes bewildering world of Ramsar resolutions, guidelines, and terminology.
It grew out of date quickly, however, especially because the work completed by the Conference of the
Contracting Parties at its 6 ,h meeting, held in Brisbane in 1996, added a large number of new tools to the Convention's
armamentarium.
Accordingly, a second edition was published in 1997, incorporating all of the institutional changes of the preceding three years
and including as annexes all of the major documents associated with the Convention.
Following COP7 in San Jose 1 in 1999, however, it was felt that the volume of Ramsar documentary material had simply grown
too large to be included as appendices to the Manual, and that the growing use by the public of the Ramsar Web site had made
the descriptive body of the Manual less necessary. At that time, then, the Ramsar Manual was let go out of print, and the 9-
volume "Ramsar Toolkit" (The Ramsar Handbooks for the Wise Use ofWetlands) was published separately in January 2000 in
order to make available all of the major guidance adopted by the COP.
The Handbooks have proved to be invaluable, and a second edition, including the guidance documents emerging from COP8 in
Valencia in 2002, will be available on CD-ROM in early 2004. The judgment about the explanatory body of the Manual,
however, turned out to be wrong, and many people have argued that there is still a need for a brief, printed introduction to the
Convention and its processes.
Thus this third edition contains a thorough update of the second, taking account of all that has changed since 1997. In place of
the 2 nd edition's 17 documentary appendices, however, in this edition we have substituted merely a list of references to the Web
addresses of all of the documents mentioned in the text and a list of the contents of the forthcoming 14-volume Handbooks
series. For Ramsar documents and resources mentioned that the text without references, those links can be found in
Appendix 3.
Suggestions for additions and improvements to this Manual in an eventual fourth edition will be very welcome.
Note: Parts of the following text have been cross-referenced to other sections of the text by use of the symbol § to indicate
section numbers.
March 2004
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