Environment Ministry Selects Ramsar Candidate Sites

The Japanese Ministry of the Environment held the second meeting of an expert committee on matters relating to the Ramsar Convention on September 2, 2004, and chose 54 high-priority domestic wetlands for possible designation to the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Sites) before November 2005, when the 9th Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Convention (COP9) will be held in Uganda. The Ministry will work with local governments towards the designation of these sites.

At COP7 in 1999, the Contracting Parties adopted a resolution to achieve a global target of 2,000 Ramsar sites by COP9 in 2005. Accordingly, Japan set the goal of increasing its sites from 11 to 22.

Candidate sites include the following: Lake Akan, famous for its algae balls (in Hokkaido Prefecture); Sanbanze, a precious tidal flat habitat for water birds in the Tokyo Bay area (Chiba Prefecture); Lake Shinjiko, a brackish lake inhabited by many water birds and rare aquatic organisms (Shimane Prefecture); and Lake Hyoko to which more than 5,000 Whistling Swans migrate from Siberia every autumn (Niigata Prefecture).

The Ramsar Convention was adopted in 1971, and signed by Japan in 1980. The first Ramsar site designated in the country was Kushiro Marsh in Hokkaido, an internationally important habitat for the Japanese Crane.




Posted: 2004/12/24 01:22:04 PM
Japanese version