Growing enthusiasm for the Coast Day

One of the objectives of the SMAP III ICZM project, implemented by MAP and METAP, is to promote awareness of the value and state of the coasts, and to provide support to the project countries in strengthening and modifying the existing national-level enabling environment, including policy and legislation.

In order to effectively raise awareness on the importance of the coast, as well as on the ICZM as the optimal policy framework for achieving sustainable development of coastal areas, an Awareness Raising Campaign (ARC), including the Coast Day event, will be organised within the project area. In each of the ten project countries, one NGO has been selected with the main objective to implement the ARC and to organise the Coast Day event. NGOs initiated activities in all of the countries of the project.

An interesting example is the Palestinian Authority selected NGO: "The General Union of the Non-Governmental Organisations (GUN-GEO)", based in Gaza, which is a network of 13 NGOs in Palestine. Due to their great enthusiasm for raising awareness on the coastal zone management, information on SMAP III project, PAP/RAC and GUN-GEO partnership, as well as information on ICZM have been broadly published in some of the most important national and local media. The information has been launched in the most distributed electronic news web site in Palestine called Palmedia, as well as through WAFA (Palestine News Agency) and in the local Newspaper Al Hayat Al Jadedah.In addition to SMAP III countries, the interest for the Coast Day has been received from other countries. So, it is hoped that the Coast Day initiative will grow beyond this project.