CTA Round Letter to TumenNET Councillors and Friends of TumenNET Letter # 1 Beijing 13 August 2000
Dear Councillors and Friends Some time has passed since our meeting in late May in Beijing and those of you who are not involved in the day-to-day affairs of our program may be wondering what has happened to TumenNET! We have been fairly active, working towards our first major milestone event, the TDA workshop scheduled to be held in Vladivostok on 29/30 August 2001. For the ‘uninitiated’ among you, ‘TDA’ is GEF-lingo and it stands for Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis - you may want to visit the UNDP/GEF website on http://www.undp.org/gef/guide/main.htm#cycle to find out more about the GEF project cycle. This workshop is primarily a technical/analytical milestone, but it will also have substantial political input to ensure our project does not work in a policy vacuum. Seven governors and vice governors will attend, representing the TumenNET zones of activity - Chitinskaya Oblast and Primorski Krai in Russia, Dornod, Khentii and Sukhbaatar Aimags in Eastern Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Jilin Province in China. The present TumenNET zones are:
The Vladivostok workshop will be followed by four sub-regional workshops later in 2001. These will involve greater numbers of local stakeholder agencies from the areas that are immediately affected by our project. At these workshops TumenNET will present early drafts of the TDA to the community and seek feedback. That way we want to ensure that recommendations that go into the SAP are carried by the community and are relevant to local development plans. Our Small Grants Program has taken off and we are currently funding a total of 29 community projects in China, Mongolia, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea. Wetlands International Japan will evaluate the program later this year and lessons learned will be incorporated into tranche II, scheduled to commence in early 2002. If you know of any NGO that might be interested to use their own funds to cooperate in any of these exiting projects please let us know! Perhaps you can circulate this letter to the NGO community in your country?
TumenNET was successful in extending assistance to the DPRK. A joint Australian-Japanese fact-finding mission to Musan Iron Ore Mine in North Hamgyong Province has just returned and we expect a final report on the environmental problems faced by this important iron ore supplier to be available in early September. Findings will be presented to the business community in selected countries. Please visit http://www.tumennet.org/news&events/news.html for updates.
We commenced talks with Japan’s Ministry of the Environment regarding involvement in and cooperation with, the TumenNET. As a Northeast Asian nation, Japan is an important partner and is deeply committed to the protection of transboundary biodiversity and international water resources in our part of the world. In addition, the Japanese industry is a major potential source of private sector investment in the region.
The TumenNET Green School Initiative will get under way this fall and a regional Clean-up Day is planned for world environment day on 5 June 2002. We will need sponsors for the clean up day - transport for the peoples involved, removal of the rubbish, donation of rubbish bags, donation of a hot meals and refreshments, etc. Please help us identify companies, enterprises that want to demonstrate their commitment to a cleaner environment! The event provides good public relations (PR) opportunities, national media exposure and, we hope, access to executive levels of government. We are discussing a cooperative agreement with the Federation of Korean Industries for the promotion of green investment in Northeast Asia, and hope to announce it in Vladivostok. The FKI is a peak industry association and a partnership with them will be of potential mutual benefit to the TumenNET and the FKI member companies. Efforts to involve the Australian environment industry have not met with success however, but we will continue to seek involving relevant industry associations from other countries.
The Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China acceded to our invitation to join the TumenNET and cooperate in the production of a strategic action program for the ‘Manchurian Zone’. To facilitate their participation, TumenNET will provide resources for the establishment and equipment of a contact point in Hohot and also include them in the EIS network. Some funds will be made available for awareness raising / media activities. We also extended an invitation to the Government of Chitinskaya Oblast, Siberia, in the Russian Federation to join the activities planned for the ‘Daurian Zone’ and they too decided to join the TumenNET. We will inform you of contact points in due course.
CHALLENGES AHEAD Participation by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must remain our overriding goal and we hope that our efforts in assisting Musan Iron Ore Mine will convince our friends in the DPRK of the benefits of the TumenNET, and of the seriousness of our commitment to help their peoples. The planned water survey of the Tumen River and its tributaries is the one project component that has not yet started, and we are working in close cooperation with our Chinese friends in Jilin to identify meaningful ways and means to implement this component. Initial work may be focussing on the Chinese and Russian territories but even here the situation is complicated because the Tumen River is a border river. The EIA sub-component will hopefully commence this fall with a policy workshop that our colleagues in Ulaanbaatar have offered to host. At that workshop we want to explore what we can reasonably hope to achieve, and how we can integrate our efforts with the overall TDA/SAP process to ensure that the EIA subcomponent supports the TDA/SAP and adds value, and does not stand alone. The promotion of green investment is something we want to do in close cooperation with provincial and national governments on the one hand and the business sector on the other hand. We now have clearly defined business environments - the Daurian Zone, The Manchurian Zone and the Tumen River Basin Zone - and promotion of green business is one topic at the forthcoming TDA workshop. We will involve councilors from the private sector, and the banking sector in particular, in development of any plans and ideas on how we can advance this important aspect. So, expect to hear from us later this year! The identification of funding agencies for any projects identified under the SAP will get under way this fall, following the completion of the TDA document. We expect to present findings and potential projects to the donor community in Beijing, Seoul, Moscow and Ulaanbaatar and will also directly involve the major lending agencies, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. _________________________________ Gunther Mau Attachment
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