Iran, Islamic Republic of

Wetlands are among the world’s most productive and valuable ecosystems and are an integral part of many ecosystems. This book attempts to raise awareness on the relevance of wetland systems and their current impacts and existency threats in different regions of the world. It aims at describing the status, challenges and loss of wetlands related to conflicts between anthropic activities and natural ecosystem services fundamental for people’s livelihoods.

Housing may be the Third World's most intractable problem, but mud, adobe, earth-bricks, soil-cement and other traditional building materials are cheap, readily available and can be made and used by the poor people themselves to build their own homes. Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for building the millions of houses which will be needed over the next twenty years. 

With over 2,700 endemic plant taxa, including relict species, the Caucasus region is one of the world’s most beautiful and important biodiversity hotspots.

Cranes, a flagship species of waterbirds, have great cultural significance - especially the Siberian Crane. Yet, even after decades of conservation efforts, cranes remain threatened with 11 species at risk. To help reverse these trends, the UNEP/GEF Siberian Crane Wetland Project  was the first project to its kind to take a "flyway" approach to conservation, looking to secure the ecological integrity of a network of 16 critical wetlands in Eurasia.

Written by a team of independent experts who are each covering the country or region from which they hail, the UNESCO Science Report 2010 analyses the trends and developments that have shaped scientific research, innovation and higher education over the past five years. The report depicts an increasingly competitive environment, one in which the flow of information, knowledge, personnel and investment has become a two-way traffic.