Kathmandu, Apr. 8:On the first earth day of the new century, Time Magazine is publishing its first ever global issue, exploring the environmental challenges of the new century and the heroes who will help it meet them.
The issues will be on sale for one month beginning Wednesday, April 19, acording to Time Asia.
The global “Heroes for the planet” issue continues its series of profiles that began in 1998. The issue highlights solutions to environmental problems and honors some of the individuals around the world who are helping to put those solutions in place.
The issue also recognizes kid “heroes for the planet” worldwide in a special insert of time for kids published within the magazine.
This is the first time that time for kids has been circulated globally.
In Asia, time has joined force with friends of the earth Hong Kong, to raise money for river savers, a region wide appeal to protect and improve some of the region’s major rivers through monitoring, education, clean-ups, catchment protection, tree planting and water conservation.
A protion of the proceeds from newsstand sales of this issue will be donated to the river savers campaign. Money will also be donated from the proceeds from all corporate bulk sales.
“Asia is rapidly becoming a water stressed continent in today’s global water crisis,” said Mei NG, director of friends of the earth Hong Kong. “due to logging and development, soil erosion and desertification is happening at an unprecedented speed both at source and along river banks, putting our rivers at serious threat.”
“at time we have long been committeed to indepth environmental reporting and see the river savers compaign with friends of the earth HK, as an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate this commitment,” said andrew butcher, publisher of time asia. “by highlighting the plight of the region’s great rivers, we are able to mobilize almost two million readers across asia to help this cause,” he added.
Asia is home to some of the world’s greatest rivers which provide drinking water, fish resources, transport waterway and recreation to billions of people.
The river savers campaign will draw attention to the plight of, and help rehabilitate, threatened regions of four of Asia’s greatest rivers. These rivers are the Yangtze river (China), the yellow river (China), the mekong river (Thiland) and the Ganges river (India).
The ganges remains the main source of fresh water for half the populations of india and bangladesh and nearly the entire populations of nepal.
Over the past 1,000 years the river and its tributaries have formed one of the largest flood plains in the world with the sediments from eroding mountainous areas.
Time is Asia’s largest english language weekly magazine with a circulation of more than 315,000. Its worldwide circulation is more than 5 million.