Over 1.1 billion people sharing this planet with us have no access to safe drinking water. Lack of access to clean drinking water causes needless suffering and death for men, women and children around the globe. This represents one of the greatest public health tragedies of our time.

Terence Vel, a conservationist working with Nature Seychelles has won a BP Conservation Program (BPCP) Award for 2006. The award comes with a cash prize of US Dollars 25,000.00, which is to be used for a conservation project. Terence says he is thrilled with this prize which is further international recognition of the excellent work being done at Nature Seychelles.

There have been great fanfares for conservation success in Seychelles recently. Unless you’ve been on another planet for the past year you’ll known about the recoveries or the new knowledge we have about species like Magpie robin or pi Santez, the  Scops owl or syer, and the White eye or Zwazo linet. Conservation programs by Nature Seychelles, the Seychelles government and private island owners and managers have enabled these unique Seychelles birds to be taken off the Critical list of the most endangered species of the world. Seychelles has received international accolades for these flagship examples of conservation action, which also offer hope and inspiration to others. We have shown we have the knowledge and expertise to plan and manage globally recognized recovery programmes. But, this work isn’t finished.

Scientists tend to be clever people. That’s why they are scientists after all. But they can’t know everything. And they can’t be everywhere. Non-scientists can have different types of information that can be useful too. And there are a lot of them. The balancing of scientific and public knowledge is a topic of great current interest. We have seen this in studies being done in Seychelles that are seeking to recognize that the fishing communities here know a thing or two about the marine environment: where the fish stocks are and how many there are, for example. We ignore this kind of knowledge, experience and expertise at our peril.