This blog is also available in French, Spanish and Russian on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.

____________________________________________________

Yesterday was World Environment Day, the United Nations’ designated day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment.

Many of us know the world faces unprecedented pressure from human activities. The United Nations Environment Programme Global Environment Outlook reports:

The state of global biodiversity is continuing to decline, with substantial and ongoing losses of populations, species and habitats. For instance, vertebrate populations have declined on average by 30 per cent since 1970, and up to two-thirds of species in some taxa are now threatened with extinction.

Education is key to reversing this decline, to find sustainable solutions to the problems we all face and to learn to live sustainably with the rest of the natural world.

Sustainable environmental action hinges on the education of all citizens, from the earliest age, in sustainable development…..No single country, however powerful, can resolve the challenges of our common environment. (Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO)

UNESCO created the Man and the Biosphere Programme “to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments”.  Biosphere Reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal/marine ecosystems or a combination thereof, which are internationally recognized within the framework of UNESCO’s Programme on Man and the Biosphere (MAB). Each Biosphere Reserve promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use. Today there are 669 biosphere reserves in 120 countries belonging to a World Network of Biosphere Reserves, all offering us opportunities to explore how to live sustainably.

Wikipedia is where 500 million of us go to understand complex subjects like climate change, biodiversity and sustainability, and give us information about the world around us. It can also foster our appreciation, wonder and empathy with the rest of the natural world through photographs,.

Everyone can contribute to Wikipedia, it gives us the opportunity to share what we know and what we see, in 2015 one trillion photos were created, more than all previous years combined. More people have phones with cameras than ever before and mobile internet is becoming a major education tool for the developing and developed countries.

UNESCO and Wiki Loves Earth have partnered to create Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves, a competition to create photographs free for everyone to use and to enrich Wikipedia. 10 winning images will be shared on the UNESCO website and social media and will be entered into the Wiki Loves Earth international competition. Wiki Loves Earth competitions around the world have created over 180,000 images of protected natural sites.

If you don’t have access to a Biosphere Reserve you can still be involved by promoting the project, adding the photographs to Wikipedia and using them to teach people about the environment.

To help more people to learn about biosphere reserves, UNESCO have made the official descriptions available under a Creative Commons license, which Wikipedia volunteers will use to create missing articles.

UNESCO’s mandate is to build peace in the minds of men and women. Biosphere Reserves are the places where we discover ways to live in harmony with the environment. Wikipedia is where we inspire and teach each other how.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves will run from today until 30 June.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves is created in collaboration by the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme, Wikimedia volunteers (special thanks to Navino Evans, Mykola Kozlenko and Romaine), John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO), and Wikimedia Ukraine.

John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at UNESCO

The views expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

The post Share your photos of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves on Wikipedia to inspire the world appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

I have been working with the Sector for External Relations and Public Information unit at The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to make images from their archive available on Wikimedia Commons, the media site for all Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the most used educational resource in the world and the Wikimedia projects receive over 21 billion page views per month. This includes users from an amazing project called Wikipedia Zero which provides over 400 million people in 35 countries completely free access with no data charges to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects on their mobile phones.

Mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can’t afford the mobile data charges.

Wikipedia Zero

 

UNESCO shares many goals with the Wikimedia movement, together we can make available an amazing amount of the world’s significant cultural and educational material available to everyone on the planet – global content for a global audience.

UNESCO

In today’s increasingly diverse societies, UNESCO continues to accomplish every day its fundamental humanist mission to support people in understanding each other and working together to build lasting peace.

UNESCO: Learning to Live Together

UNESCO works to create inclusive knowledge societies and empower local communities by increasing access to and preservation and sharing of information and knowledge in all of UNESCO’s domains. Knowledge societies must build on four pillars: freedom of expression; universal access to information and knowledge; respect for cultural and linguistic diversity; and quality education for all.

UNESCO: Building Knowledge Societies

Wikimedia

Knowledge should be free: Access to information empowers people to make rational decisions about their lives. We believe the ability to access information freely and without restrictions is a basic human right. Our vision requires that the educational materials we collect and create together be free for others to use and reuse. Our work also depends on free and open formats and technologies.

Share with every human being: The Wikimedia movement strives to include every single human being in our work by making our knowledge resources available and providing the venue for all people to share their knowledge. We prioritize efforts that empower disadvantaged and underrepresented communities, and that help overcome barriers to participation.

 Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary: What We Believe

Open knowledge for all: The vision of Wikimedia UK. We work to make as much open knowledge available as we can and remove barriers to access for as many people as possible. 

Wikimedia UK

I am currently applying for a Wikimedia Foundation grant to work as Wikimedian in Residence for UNESCO with the aims of moving further towards making open licensing the standard for scientific, cultural and educational organisations and engagement with Wikimedia common practice. During the residency I will:

• Train UNESCO and its partner organisations staff to contribute to Wikimedia projects including creating and improving content receiving 100,000,000 views per year on Wikimedia projects.
• Making 30,000 images, audio files, videos, data and other content files from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on Wikimedia projects
• Create a model and resources to encourage other UN organisations and their partner organisations to engage with Wikimedia.

You can read about and support the application here.

A full set of images can be seen on my grant application or at Wikimedia Commons in the category: Images from the archive of UNESCO. These images can be used by by anyone for any purpose using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO license.

You are free:

• to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

The post Wikimedia and UNESCO team up to share the world’s culture appeared first on Wikimedia UK.