International news

Stephen Garnett is an environmental scientist, who has been studying Australian birds since 1974. Stephen is also the Joint COP Appointed Councillor for Birds. He is currently on sabbatical at the CMS Secretariat and Christie Burley, an intern of the Joint CMS and AEWA Communications Unit, has taken the opportunity to interview Stephen on his recent paper published in Nature Sustainability and the work he is currently doing for CMS.

Bonn, 13 October 2018 - For the sixth consecutive year, the operatic choir Lirica San Rocco of the Lyrical Cultural Club from Bologna, Italy gave a ben

Bucking a major general trend, the overall status of waterbird populations listed on the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement (AEWA) has slightly improved over the last ten years, says a new report. The findings are being released ahead of World Migratory Bird Day, an annual, UN-backed global awareness-raising and environmental education campaign focused on migratory birds and the need for international cooperation to conserve them.

An award-winning documentary entitled The Migrant - Sooty Falcons in Oman was screened last evening at the Manarat Al Saadiyat cultural centre in Abu Dhabi to mark World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) 2018. Produced by an Omani-German team, the film documents efforts to study and conserve this long-range migratory bird. The Sooty Falcon (Falco concolor) is an elegant, medium-sized bird of prey. It breeds on islands and coastal or desert cliffs, primarily in the Middle and Near East regions and flies south to wintering areas on Madagascar and the south-eastern littoral zone of the African continent.

UN Cinema screened the award-winning documentary “The Last Animals” with CMS, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Deutsche Welle as partners. The German UN Association NRW-Chapter (DGVN NRW) and the United Nations Regional Information Centre (UNRIC), invited an interested audience to the event. It was hosted by Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle on 13 September in Bonn, Germany.

A multi-authored scientific paper on the state of the world’s birds of prey and owls was published last week in Biological Conservation and is now freely available online. According to the research, 18% percent of raptors are threatened with extinction and 52% of raptors have declining global populations.

Timor-Leste has confirmed its support towards the protection of dugongs and their vital seagrass habitats by becoming the 27th Signatory to the CMS Dugong MOU. The Secretary of State for the Environment, H.E. Demétrio do Amaral de Carvalho signed the MOU earlier today at a signing ceremony in Dili, Timor-Leste.

The Secretariat of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) in its capacity as Depositary of the Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation and Management

International experts met in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, to develop a strategy for the Arabian Peninsula to monitor the region’s waterbirds and their threatened wetland habitats. The regional strategy aims to build capacity to monitor coastal waterbirds and important wetland sites in all countries of the Arabian Peninsula.

CMS has become a member of UN-Oceans as BBNJ meetings start at UN Headquarters in New York this week. The new membership became official just before the start of the First Session of the Intergovernmental Conference on an International Legally Binding Instrument under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ).