Jordan Environment Watch : Focus on Environmental Applications in the Arab World

The Arab Environment Monitor blog is always searching for new ideas and modifications of its focus seeking to provide a unique source of information with a specific identity.

While reviewing the past 14 months of the AEM lifespan, and analysing the content posted at this blog I have came to realize that this blog offers a good source of information about the diagnosis and monitoring of environmental conditions in the Arab World and it can be considered as an awareness and education tool in some perspectives.

However, I still feel that we should move one step beyond awareness and start focusing on real implementation and applications. The ability of the Arab World to identify environmental problems and provide theoritical assessments and promises has been documented and based on extensive investments from local and international resources, but the major gap is in the ability to highlight good progress on the ground and identifying lessons learned from environmnetal applications.

Starting June 2007 the Arab Environment Monitor will try to provide a focused service for all its readers and browsers in documenting environmental applications and best practices as well as lessons learned at the levels of legislation, policies, management, technology and education. It is about time to highlight the real lessons and practices and move away from the rhetorics of theory and complaints about the lack of resources and capacity and start paying attention to the applied components of environmental protection.

I hope this new focus will provide a more useful identity for this blog and will provide few ideas for scaling up and replication in Arab countries as well as identification of mistakes we do not want to practice again.