TEHRAN — Iran has registered September 23 as the clean caves day on its national environmental calendar.

“With the purpose of raising public awareness about the value of caves and creating a culture of protecting these ecosystems we have decided to mark September 23 as the national clean caves day,” said Asghar Mobaraki, an official with the Department of Environment.

To underline the importance of caves a working group tasked with protecting these valuable heritage was formed in 2010, the Department of Environment website quoted Mobaraki as saying.

“Caves are not only great historical heritage to us but are natural habitat to species endemic to these ecosystems and some wild animals’ lives such as bats, bears and leopards depend on them,” he added.

“Over the past two years we’ve taken some practical measures in preserving and managing the caves,” he said.

Drawing up, adopting and enforcing instructions for protecting the caves in the current year, forming working groups for preserving caves at provincial level, holding numerous workshops nationwide, and cleaning up some 100 caves with participation of some 2,000 spelunkers and speleologist which has also resulted in being lauded by the International Union of Speleology are of the measures taken by Iran to protect the caves, Mobaraki highlighted.

MQ/MG