Five year anniversary of Cham Island Biosphere Reserve - UNESCO recognition
(QNO) - A ceremony was held in Cham Island commune (Hoi An city) on 25 May to mark the fifth anniversary of its recognition as a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO and the tenth anniversary of founding Cham Island Marine Park.
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| After being recognized as a World Biosphere Reserve, Cham Island has received more international tourists. |
Many representatives from central governments, Quang Nam province, Vietnam UNESCO National Committee in Ha Noi, scientists and researchers took part in a workshop to review and value the first results of Cham Island Biosphere Reserve preservation, point out the weakness in the process of mannaging and operating this biosphere reserves as well.
The delegates shared together the experiences in safeguarding and promoting the values of biosphere reserve as well as the cultural combination for tourism development in the world biosphere reserve and the harmony benefits between human being and biosphere reserve, world biosphere reserve trade mark development and the role of marine parks in marine biological deversity restoration.
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| An art performance to welcome 5 year of World Biosphere Reserves (recognization) recognition for Cham island |
Since 20 May, some activities have been organised such as “Fishermen and Cham sea and island festival”, conference to review 5 years of the campaign “Cham Island says NO with nylon bags”, Cham island and Vietnam’s sovereignty over Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly), an awards ceremony of “ We love our country’s sea and islands”…
The Cham Island World Biosphere Reserve covers 33,164 ha with 83,792 of population. It is devided into 3 zones: buffer, core and transition.
There are over 311 coral reefs in the biosphere reserve park, with about 300 species and most of them are soft coral. The average cover takes 41%, 50 ha of sea grass with 5 peculiar species (the average cover takes 15%-25%), 76 species of seaweed, over 270 species of fish fauna, 97 molluscs and 11 other fish fauna. Cham Island’s special use forests have 499 species of 115 plant families. The result of scientific researches at the under 100 metre-altitude places showed the (exixtence) existence of 120 Vietnamese herbs in the ever green forests.
By HOANG LY