MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT

Welcome to the Commonwealth Geographical Bureau’s (CGB) website! It has taken us quite a long time to get this on-line and I am happy that we finally managed it, thanks to Alan Dixon and Tony Binns.

For those of you that are new to the CGB, let me introduce you to our world. The CGB operates under the umbrella of the Commonwealth Foundation. We are the representative body of some 300 geography departments, units, sections and faculties within universities and higher institutes of learning in the 58 Commonwealth family of countries.

The perennial question I am often confronted is how does one become a member of the CGB. Essentially, the CGB does not have any formal methods of membership. Either as a department or a faculty member of a Geography Department within the Commonwealth you automatically become a member of the CGB. We correspond mainly to Heads of Departments and we send our correspondence generally to the Heads of Departments. If you want to be on our mailing list, please contact our Secretary, Professor Tony Binns (University of Otago) at j.a.binns@geography.otago.ac.nz

The CGB derives most of its funding from the Commonwealth Foundation and we are indeed very grateful for the gracious, consistent and encouraging support we have had from the Commonwealth Foundation over the last several decades.

The CGB’s activities annually are based on communicating with all of you and initiating capacity-building workshops. Every end of the year, we publish our CGB newsletter and send it to geography departments and related institutions within the Commonwealth. This newsletter reaches out especially to countries and departments which do not have email/computer facilities. The aim of the CGB newsletter is to keep members informed of activities, conferences, positions available, publications, post-graduate scholarships, post-doc positions etc, in the various geography departments. If you like to have your department’s activities in the newsletter, please contact our Secretary Professor Tony Binns at j.a.binns@geography.otago.ac.nz. Your submissions should be in by early-September of every year for publication.

Over the last eight years, the CGB has moved away from self-indulgent academic activities and concentrated our efforts on promoting capacity building workshops in the less fortunate Commonwealth countries. These workshops over a week have dealt with many social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges that countries face. Hence in the past we have held Workshops on eco-tourism, food security, urban problems and HIV-Aids. This year, we have just completed in June 2005 (12 to 25) two very successful Workshops on the Human Consequences of Climate Change in Penang, Malaysia (with Universiti Sains Malaysia) and Colombo, Sri Lanka (with University of Colombo). We look forward to running more Workshops in future in Africa, South Asia and possibly Southeast Asia. In fact the Penang workshop was the first time the CGB held a capacity-building workshop in a Southeast Asian country with mainly Southeast Asian participants from Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore. If you have interest in considering any Workshops, either to host an event or to contribute as a lecturer-coordinator, please let me know. With Commonwealth Foundation’s financial support, we hope to run a Workshop in 2006 on water issues.

The CGB executive board is elected every four years in association with the International Geographical Union’s (IGU) meetings. We were last elected in Glasgow in August 2004. Our current term of office will last to 2008 when new office bearers will be elected at the IGU meeting in Tunisia, North Africa. We hope to see you there!

The CGB is as strong and as active as our members support and involvement. We look forward to your suggestions and contributions. I wish you all a fruitful academic career and hope you keep our association alive with your participation.