The Ramsar Convention (Convention on Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat) is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands. Adopted in 1971, it entered into force in 1975 and as of March 2011 has 160 Contracting Parties.Japan was the twenty-fourth party to accede, on 17 October 1980.Kushiro-shitsugen was the first of Japan's thirty-seven Ramsar Sites as of the tenth Conference of the Contracting Parties (2008), with protected wetlands totalling 130,027 hectares. Japan set the objective of designating six more sites by the time of COP11 in 2012. In May 2012 it was announced that nine candidate sites had been identified.

The nine candidate sites identified for designation at COP 11 in July 2012 are:

In Japan may refer to:

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Japan ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.

Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.

The Ramsar Convention (The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat) is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands, i.e., to stem the progressive encroachment on and loss of wetlands now and in the future, recognizing the fundamental ecological functions of wetlands and their economic, cultural, scientific, and recreational value. It is named after the town of Ramsar in Iran.

The convention was developed and adopted by participating nations at a meeting in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran on February 2, 1971, hosted by the Iranian Department of Environment, and came into force on December, 21 1975.

The Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance now includes 1,950 sites (known as Ramsar Sites) covering around 1,900,000 km² (730,000 sq mi), up from 1,021 sites in 2000. The nation with the highest number of sites is the United Kingdom at 168; the nation with the greatest area of listed wetlands is Canada, with over 130,000 km² (50,000 sq mi), including the Queen Maud Gulf Migratory Bird Sanctuary at 62,800 km² (24,200 sq mi).