World Wetlands Day 2016, February 2nd.

World Wetlands Day, 2 February.
Journée mondiale des zones humides, le 2 Février.
Día Mundial de los Humedales, 2 de febrero.
世界濕地日, 2月2日。
Всемирный день водно-болотных угодий, 2 февраля.

 يوم العالمي للأراضي الرطبة، 2 فبراير.

Theme 2016 : Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods.
Thème 2016 : Les zones humides pour notre avenir: mode de vie durables.
Tema 2016 : Humedales para nuestro futuro: Medios de vida sostenibles.
2016年主題 :  濕地為我們的未來：可持續生計.
Тема 2016 : Водно-болотные угодья для нашего будущего : Устойчивые средства к существованию.
موضوع 2016: الأراضي الرطبة لمستقبلنا. سبل العيش المستدامة.

 

Message from Ania Grobiccki, The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands Secretary-General on the occasion of World Wetlands Day 2016.

Every year on 2 February people in many countries come together to celebrate wetlands and their vital importance for the future of our planet.

Wetlands ensure our supply of fresh, drinkable water.  They grow a significant portion of the world’s food supply with fish and rice. Inland, wetlands act as sponges to slow down river flooding and they form coastal barriers against storm surges.  And just one single type of wetland – peatland - stores twice as much carbon as all of the forests in the world.

For World Wetlands Day 2016, there are over 800 events planned at various wetlands around the world to celebrate another benefit of wetlands: Sustainable Livelihoods.
More than a billion people around the world make their living directly from wetlands, doing jobs such as fishing, rice farming or handicrafts. Other sectors such as travel and eco-tourism, water transport and aquaculture all depend on healthy wetlands.

Yet some 64% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900; many of them converted to agricultural use or urban development.

 This alarming loss means it is urgent to help people understand that preserving wetlands does not have to mean restricting economic growth or depriving people of livelihoods. Quite the opposite!

2016 marks the dawn of a new era. The UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted last September map out the route from the vicious circle of environmental degradation towards a virtuous cycle where we preserve, restore and wisely use ecosystems precisely because they are vital for our prosperity. 

 

The new Ramsar Strategy 2016-2024 calls for wetland benefits to be featured in strategies and plans relating to key sectors such as water, energy, mining, agriculture, tourism, urban development, infrastructure, industry, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries at the national and local level.

 It also calls for wetland functions, services and benefits to be widely demonstrated and documented.

 

This is why, for World Wetlands Day 2016, the Ramsar Secretariat has assembled a range of inspiring stories that demonstrate how wetlands can and do provide sustainable livelihoods. You can read these stories.

 

As always, these support materials are made available with the support of the Danone-Evian Fund for Water, which has sponsored World Wetlands Day since 1997. 

 

We invite you to visit a wetland, get to know the local communities and how they wisely use this ecosystem. Parties to the Ramsar Convention have designated over 2200 Ramsar Sites of International Importance, protected for the benefits they provide to the country and the world.

To encourage the participation of young people, we are running a photo competition from 2 February to 2 March open to anyone aged 15 to 24 years. You are invited to capture an image showing how “wetlands are essential for sustainable livelihoods,” and upload as many as 3 photos to the World Wetlands Day website. The winner of the photo contest will enjoy a free flight to visit a wetland anywhere in the world, courtesy of Star Alliance.

 

Happy World Wetlands Day!  Let’s help everyone understand just how vital wetlands are! 

 

Ania Grobicki Acting

RAMSAR CONVENTION Secretary-General



 

 

 

 

Wetlands are essential for human health and prosperity. They provide us with fresh water, ensure our food supply, sustain biodiversity, protect against flooding, and store carbon dioxide. As a major source of employment globally, they are also ideally placed to showcase truly sustainable livelihoods.

More than a billion livelihoods

   Wetlands already sustain a vast range of jobs globally :

• Almost a billion households in Asia, Africa and the Americas depend on rice growing and processing for their main livelihoods.
• More than 660 million people rely on fishing and aquaculture for a living; most commercial fish breed or spawn in coastal wetlands, and 40 % of all fish consumed are raised in aquaculture.
• An estimated half of international tourists seek relaxation in wetland areas, especially coastal zones. The travel and tourism sectors support 266 million jobs, and account for 8.9 % of the world’s employment.
• Rivers and inland waterways play a vital role in transporting goods and people in many parts of the world. In the Amazon basin, 12 million passengers and 50 million tons of freight are moved each year by41 different shipping companies.
• Vast networks deliver fresh water and treat wastewater around the world, while employing significant workforces. For example, Bangkok’s Metropolitan Waterworks Authority employs over 5,300 staff. 
•  The bottled water industry delivered over 70 billion gallons of water worldwide in 2013. Danone sells major brands such as Evian and Volvic, Bonafont and Mizone, and employs more than 37,000 people in its water businesses worldwide.
• Harvesting and processing plants,fruits, reeds and grasses also provide significant employment directlyin or near wetlands, especially in developing countries

Situation : a vicious circle

Despite all the jobs and other vital benefits that wetlands provide, 64 % of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900. The wetlands that still remain are often so degraded that the people who directly rely on wetlands for their living – often the very poor –are driven into even deeper poverty. In addition, by 2025, it is estimated that 35 % of people will directly face declining water supplies. This is the result of a point of view that mistakenly sees wetlands as wasteland.

 

Solution : a virtuous cycle

Enabling people to make a decent living while ensuring that wetlands will always provide drinkable water, biodiversity, food and their many other benefits, do not have to be conflicting goals. In fact, the new UN Sustainable Development Goals underline that reducing poverty requires us to protect and restore ecosystems such as wetland.

 

 


Sustainability unites three key aspects of development to achieve that goal

1. Economic development: ensuring that people have the ways and means to build their own income and wealth
2. Social development: improving cooperation, respect and trust between social groups, and promoting gender equality
3. Environmental protection: conserving and restoring the earth’s ecosystems to benefit both human life and the natural environment

How to create sustainable livelihoods: What are the key ingredients?
  

Use a people-centred approach to understand needs

• assess how vulnerable people are to shocks, natural disasters and civil strife, and how to reduce that vulnerability
•  understand how important seasonal prices and employment opportunities are, and explore other options
•  take an inventory of the potential resources available

Make multiple kinds of ‘capital’ available

•  actual products harvested from wetlands such as reeds, fish, rice etc.
•  skills and knowledge to understand trade-offs and prioritizing good health to be able to earn a living
•  a voice in planning how local wetlands should be used
•  basic infrastructure, equipment and tools
•  credit, cash or micro-loans

Identify who can provide the different kinds of ‘capital’ and make the changes happen

•  integrate key actors such as governments, institutions, NGOs and local communities
• determine who will take what role in making the changes

Forum :  World Wetlands Day - February 2




2016 World Wetlands Day theme- Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods

The Ramsar Secretariat announces Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods as the theme for World Wetlands Day in 2016. This theme is selected to demonstrate the vital role of wetlands for the future of humanity and specifically their relevance towards achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

 

Thanks to the financial support from Danone-Evian, the Secretariat is currently preparing outreach material to support country activities organized to celebrate World Wetlands Day and raise awareness about the value of wetlands for humanity.

Events :  World Wetlands Day 2016 events

World Wetlands Day

WWD 2016 Photo Contest "Wetlands are essential for sustainable livelihoods"

World Wetland 2015, February 2

Theme 2015 : Wetlands for Our Future.

                      Humedales para nuestro futuro – ¡Únase a nosotros!

                     Les zones humides pour notre avenir – Participez!

Wetlands - Big benefits for people and nature

World Wetlands Day, 2 Février.

 Día Mundial de los Humedales, 2 de febrero.

 Journée mondiale des zones humides, le 2 Février.

 世界濕地日，2月2日.

 Всемирный день водно-болотных угодий, 2 февраля.

What is World Wetlands Day?

2 February each year is World Wetlands Day. This day marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on 2 February 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Each year since 1997, the Ramsar Secretariat has provided materials so that government agencies, non-governmental organizations, conservation organizations, and groups of citizens can help raise public awareness about the importance and value of wetlands.

“Wetlands for our future” – this year’s theme for World Wetlands Day – seeks to highlight the varieties of ways in which wetlands provide for us all, and the many ways that we can all contribute to their conservation and restoration.

Too few people realize the numerous services and benefits wetlands provide and their importance for humans and the planet. Most importantly, wetlands are the source of our daily water.

Additionally wetlands feed humanity: rice, grown in wetland paddies, is the staple diet of nearly three billion people. The average human consumes 19 kg of fish each year. And most of the fish sold, breed and raise their young in coastal waters and estuaries. Moreover, 70% of all fresh water extracted globally is used for crop irrigation.

Wetlands purify and filter harmful waste from water, helping to absorb harmful fertilizers and pesticides, as well as heavy metals and toxins from industry. As an example, the Nakivubo Swamp in Kampala, Uganda filters sewage and industrial effluents for free; a treatment plant to do the same job would cost $2 million per year.
Wetlands act as nature's shock absorbers: peatlands and wet grasslands in river basins act as natural sponges, absorbing rainfall, creating wide surface pools that ease any flooding in rivers. The same storage capacity will also safeguard against the impact of drought.
Wetlands provide sustainable livelihoods and products: 61.8 million people depend directly on fishing and fisheries for a living. Timber for building, vegetable oil, medicinal plants, animal fodder, and stems and leaves for weaving also comes from our wetlands.
And importantly for our future, wetlands help to fight climate change. Peatlands alone store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, and in the face of rising sea levels, coastal wetlands reduce the impact of hurricanes and tsunamis. They also bind the shoreline and resist erosion.

World Wetlands Day 2015 - Statement from Dr. Christopher Briggs, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention

I am delighted to be joining you to celebrate World Wetlands Day! This year I will be seeing again how Uganda, which is a key Party to the Ramsar Convention, makes this day special and makes wetlands come alive and leap into people’s imaginations. With the Ramsar Centre for East Africa, I will be visiting the Letembe Bay site. We thank Danone-evian who financed the communication and outreach for World Wetlands Day.

With our theme this year as “Wetlands for our Future”, we want to highlight the choices ahead of us all, considering the all-too-real threat to wetlands around the world. Latest research indicates that over 64% of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed since 1900, and in some regions, notably Asia, the loss is even higher.

This rapid decline means that access to fresh water is worsening for almost two billion people worldwide, while flood control, disaster risk reduction, carbon storage and traditional wetland livelihoods are all suffering and our futures with them. In addition to loss of water and other wetlands services, the richness of wildlife - our biodiversity - has also been affected.

Populations of freshwater species have declined by 76% in the last forty years, according to WWF’s Living Planet Index, and this is a worse prospect than any other place on earth.
What is driving this loss? Unfortunately, wetlands are often viewed as wasteland; something to be drained, filled and converted to other purposes. The main causes of wetlands loss and degradation are changes in land use, especially conversion to agriculture and grazing and the growth of cities and their infrastructure. And this is all made worse by the leakage into our wetlands of an excess of nutrients, and water being diverted to make dams, ponds, channels and canals.

The reason we should care more about our wetlands is because they are the only source of our fresh water and the essential ingredient for all development. So, we need to educate people of all ages to understand how wetlands already play a part in their lives and get them to care as passionately as we do for their maintenance and restoration:

• Wetlands provide the fresh water for every one of us. Every human needs 20-50 litres of water a day for basic drinking, cooking and cleaning. Wetlands provide that water. 

• Wetlands also filter and clean harmful chemicals and waste from water. Plants from wetlands can help absorb harmful fertilizers and pesticides, as well as heavy metals and toxins from industry. Topically we can say that the Nakivubo Swamp in Kampala, Uganda filters all the sewage and industrial wastes for free; a treatment plant to do the same would cost over $2 million per year.

• Wetlands feed humanity. Rice, grown in wetland paddies, is the staple diet of nearly three billion people. And the average human consumes 19 kg of fish each year, but few know that almost all commercial fish breed and raise their young in coastal marshes and estuaries. 

• 70% of all fresh water we extract from wetlands globally is used for irrigation of our crops and help powers the business of agriculture that maintains over 570 million farms and keeps us fed. 

• Wetlands are bursting with biodiversity. Wetlands are home to more than 100,000 known freshwater species alone, and that number is growing every year. In just 10 years, 272 new species of freshwater fish were discovered in the Amazon. 

• Wetlands act as nature’s shock absorbers. Wetlands within river basins act as natural sponges, absorbing rainfall, creating wide surface pools that reduce the impact of flooding in rivers. The same storage capacity also safeguards against drought.

• Wetlands help fight climate change. Peatlands alone store more than twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world! In the face of rising sea levels, coastal wetlands reduce the impact of typhoons and tsunamis. They also bind the shoreline and resist increasing levels of erosion.

• Wetlands provide sustainable livelihoods and products. 61.8 million people depend directly on fishing and fisheries for a living. Timber for building, vegetable oil, medicinal plants, animal fodder, and stems and leaves for weaving also come from well managed wetlands.

But wetlands are also part of our emotional history. Who can’t remember a childhood trip to the beach, learning to fish in a river, fishing in a pond in the summer time? I spent all my youth in rivers and ponds catching fish and damming streams and had fun all summer long and came back every day with wet clothes and boots full of water. Since then, I have been in and out of wetlands all my life, and enjoyed them all.

This year, we are inviting people to think about their own wetlands story, and how they can help to stop this dramatic loss of wetlands. We would like you to visit our website or use our twitter hashtag “Wetlands For Our Future” to make a pledge to help wetlands and join thousands of people around the world who also want to reverse the trend. Your pledge can be as simple as taking shorter showers to save water, or making sure you take reusable bags to the supermarket, or getting more practically involved by helping to organise a clean-up of your local wetland.

Educating younger people is vital. We need to get the next generation engaged and knowledgeable on how important wetlands are and the more people know, the further we can spread the message.

This year, for young people between the ages of 15 and 24, we are running a photo competition in partnership with the Star Alliance. From today until the 3rd of March, visit a wetland, and take a picture there, for the chance to win a free flight anywhere in the world to visit a wetland site. All submissions to our site, www.worldwetlandsday.org will be voted on and the shortlisted finalists judged by a panel of experts including renowned UK landscape photographer Charlie Waite.
So join us this year, and take up the challenge to help secure Wetlands for all our Futures.

Happy World Wetlands Day.

Dr. Christopher Briggs, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention

 Press release 

 

•  Wetlands for our Future: Act now to prevent, stop, and reverse wetland loss.

 Key Facts 

•  Wetlands - Issues :: International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
•  Wetlands play critical role in economic growth of the Mekong. CGIAR
•  Wetlands for Our Future: Act Now to Prevent, Stop, and Reverse Wetland Loss -UNEP
• The future of humanity depends on wetlands. NZ Department of Conservation.
• Wetlands offer substantial economic, social and environmental values which, if managed sustainably - Australian Government Department of Environment (Environemt.gov.au).

Wetlands for Our Future: Act Now to Prevent, Stop, and Reverse Wetland Loss - See more at: http://www.unep.org/newscentre/Default.aspx?DocumentID=2818&ArticleID=11129&l=en#sthash.ZtYYMade.YvvmSzQI.dpuf

Wetlands for Our Future: Act Now to Prevent, Stop, and Reverse Wetland Loss - See more at: http://www.unep.org/newscentre/Default.aspx?DocumentID=2818&ArticleID=11129&l=en#sthash.ZtYYMade.YvvmSzQI.dpuf

Wetlands for Our Future: Act Now to Prevent, Stop, and Reverse Wetland Loss - See more at: http://www.unep.org/newscentre/Default.aspx?DocumentID=2818&ArticleID=11129&l=en#sthash.ZtYYMade.YvvmSzQI.dpuf

 Latest Tweets  #WetlandsForOurFuture
 

World Wetlands Day 2014, February 2nd

In recognition of the important interrelationship between Farming and Wetlands, the theme for World Wetlands Day 2014 is Wetlands and agriculture: partners.

World Wetlands Day - February 2

 

Global Inundation Map (GLIN)

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The Global Inundation Map, termed GLIN, is a global raster map showing estimates for average annual minimum, average annual maximum, and long-term maximum inundation extents at 15 arc-second spatial resolution. In a partner product (GLIN-monthly) monthly average inundation extents are represented

Vulnerability of European Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera to Climate Change

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A dataset of bio-ecological traits of 1,942 Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT) taxa was used to analyze the potential vulnerability of EPT species to climate change at the scale of European ecoregions.

Global Waterfall Database (HydroFALLS)

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The Global Waterfall Database, termed HydroFALLS, is a point shapefile and related attribute table showing the location of 4362 waterfalls including their names and estimated mean river flow. The database has been compiled and validated using a variety of source information and constitutes the first consistent global GIS layer of waterfall features. The point locations have been co-registered to the global HydroSHEDS river network.

Global Freshwater Fish Species Richness

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The 1,054 drainage basins in this map cover more than 80% of the world’s continental surface area. The evaluation of native, non-native, and endemic freshwater fish species is based on an extensive literature survey.

Global Diversity Patterns in Freshwater Systems

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Global patterns of freshwater species diversity are described using two diversity descriptors (species richness and degree of endemicity) for freshwater amphibians, birds, crayfish, fishes, mammals and reptiles per HydroBASIN basin.

Global Diversity Patterns in Freshwater Systems

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Global patterns of freshwater species diversity are described using two diversity descriptors (species richness and degree of endemicity) for freshwater amphibians, birds, crayfish, fishes, mammals and reptiles per HydroBASIN basin.

European Freshwater Alien Species

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Introductions of invasive alien species (IAS) are considered one of the main pressures to freshwater ecosystems. In this context, the maps presented here aim to assist scientists and policy makers in their efforts to prevent and control alien invasions.

Freshwater Fish Extinction Rates due to Water Availability Loss from Climate Change

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Based on a global geospatial framework of river drainage basins and on future climate data from 18 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) from the ‘pessimistic’ IPCC scenario (A2), we quantify future active drainage basin area losses and combine them with an extinction rate–area curve to project future surface-dependent extinction rates. We then estimate the future projected change in extinction rate worldwide and project the number of extinct species in 1010 river basins.

Vulnerability of European Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera to Climate Change

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A dataset of bio-ecological traits of 1,942 Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT) taxa was used to analyze the potential vulnerability of EPT species to climate change at the scale of European ecoregions.

Freshwater Species Data: Increasing Knowledge on Biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Patterns of richness and threat for four freshwater groups represent significant new knowledge on the distribution and status of Africa’s biodiversity.

Freshwater Biodiversity and Protected Areas in Africa: a Gap Analysis

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This map shows that the existing protected areas in mainland Africa do not adequately cover sub-catchments identified as potential freshwater Key Biodiversity Areas. Only 21.30% of the total area of these priority sub-catchments fall within the protected area network.

Multiple Human Pressures and Their Spatial Patterns in European Running Waters

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This study represents the first high-resolution data analysis of human pressures at the European scale, where important pressure criteria for 9,330 sampling sites in 14 European countries were analysed.