YAWA Attends International Polar Year Meeting in Cambridge (2001 Laureate)

I have just attended the International Polar Year meeting in Cambridge for two weeks, from the beginning of June. It has been a very productive meeting and I have been given the role to lead the IPY Global Community to create awareness of the life in the polar regions to communities in the non-polar regions, vice versa.

The first thing I am going to do is to organise in Malaysia the Ice Station Antarctica Exhibition to Malaysia and Asia with the Natural History Museum and the National Science Centre.

Secondly, we are promoting our activity to curb global warming through our project 'Keep Planting Trees' as an activity to be adopted globally through the IPY Global Community Programme.

Thirdly, to build a global network for the IPY Global Community to contribute any activity towards understanding IPY, climate change and global warming. On receipt of information of activities with pictures to us, we will give a climate balloon that will appear on the virtual IPY Portal website.

Its coming along and full information will be released by September when we will launch the IPY Global Community Programme, when we meet in Sweden. This is truly exciting for me and for YAWA. Right now, I am making as many contacts for organisations to make a contribution that will make a huge difference to the world.

I am also hoping to invite the G500 Forum members to contribute... I have already written to Sir David Attenborough and most wonderfully he has replied to me. As he is so busy, he was not able to meet me whilst I'm in London. I hope he will agree to act as our mentor if we produce an Eco-documentary on climate change Malaysia, in which Aishah and Adam would like to work on it.

Marilyn's wonderful to be able to do what is important to us all... however small, its a big contribution, anyhow.

Take care,

Warmly

Khadijah Abdul Rahman
yawa_35@streamyx.com