Next month will mark 25 years since enactment of the Iwokrama Act, which marked the establishment of the Iwokrama International Centre for Rain Forest Conservation and Development.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Iwokrama Inter-national Centre has announced that it will celebrate the milestone through a series of low key activities throughout the year.
In a statement issued last week, the Centre said it will launch a series of educational presentations and videos to start its observances. The series are meant to be educational for students and even for the general public, it said, while noting that they will target issues such as biodiversity, protected areas, the business of conservation, and other activities that Iwokrama is involved with. “The idea is to educate and empower students to make decisions about choosing conservation as a career but also make the general public more aware of conservation activities in Guyana,” the Centre noted.
The first set of presentations were launched on April 22, 2021, Earth Day, in collaboration with NCN.
Noting that the theme of Earth Day 2021 is “Restore Our Earth,” which focuses on natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking that can restore the world’s ecosystems, the Centre highlighted that the theme rejects the notion that mitigation or adaptation are the only ways to address climate change. “It is up to each and every one of us to ‘Restore Our Earth’ not just because we care about the natural world, but because we live on it,” it added.
In order to promote a healthy Earth to support jobs, livelihoods, health and survival, and happiness, the Centre suggests that persons can plant a tree; support pollinators; clean up plastic in their community; swap out kitchen and household products for environmentally-friendlier ones; reduce, reuse, recycle; conserve water; and get children involved.
The Iwokrama International Centre (IIC) was established in 1996 under a joint mandate from the Government of Guyana and the Commonwealth Secretariat to manage the Iwokrama forest, a unique reserve of 371,000 hectares of rainforest “in a manner that will lead to lasting ecological, economic and social benefits to the people of Guyana and to the world in general.”
