You learn something every day. Let me introduce you to RAMSAR
For the past four years, I have chaired a body – currently called the Customer Panel – for a company called South East Water. The operation and regulation of the water sector is incredibly complicated with lots of specialist terminology and a great many acronyms.
This week, we had a meeting at which we focused especially on environmental issues. We learned that some 44% of the area covered by South East Water lies within landscape which has some kind of environmental designation. The national average is 24%.
So there are 144 SSSIs which are Sites of Special of Special Scientific Interest – a designation I know. But the paper before us mentioned five RAMSAR sites and this was an acronym that was totally new to me.
A quick search on Google revealed that RAMSAR is not actually an acronym but a place – a town in Iran where in 1971 there was agreement on the Ramsar Convention (formally, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat).
You learn something every day …
February 4th, 2016 at 10:44 pm
World Wetlands Day, the anniversary of the signing of that agreement, has just been marked, on 2 Feb.
http://www.ramsar.org/activity/world-wetlands-day-2016
February 4th, 2016 at 10:45 pm
That was the day of our discussion! What are the odds?
February 8th, 2016 at 8:59 am
365 to 1 this year, being a leap year of 366 days. A long shot.