Women doing oysterfarming in between the mangroves in the Saloum delta, Senegal
Building with Nature Asia Next stop: the rest of Asia. We have created Building with Nature Asia to partner India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia and others to address a range of coastal problems previously only achieved by “hard” engineering. And we have joined the coalition for mainstreaming Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), a collaboration that puts NBS first among the options for infrastructure. Within a decade such projects could be protecting 10 million or more people, at a fraction of the cost of sea walls. Recognition The value of restoring wetlands for maintaining biodiversity, improving livelihoods and protecting against the impacts of climate change is increasingly recognised internationally. Of the ten World Restoration Flagships announced by the UN, five involved wetlands, from Gulf seagrasses and Indian rivers to wet grasslands in Central Asia. Growing value This rising awareness makes our expertise in wetland restoration of growing value. An internal analysis of our work over the past two decades, completed in 2022, identified 29 projects that have restored wetlands in 16 countries. They ranged from small water channels supplying villages in Mali’s
Inner Niger Delta, to rewetting 22,000 hectares of drained peatlands in Russia, and rehabilitating 26,000 hectares in and around Lake Loktak in northeast India. Many involved local communities as active partners, something we see as central to success. And in almost all cases, those communities were the main beneficiaries. Recently, our attention has focused on peatlands. They hold roughly a third of all the planet’s soil carbon, and their continuing loss is reckoned responsible for around 4 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Stemming and reversing this loss was highlighted as a critical task in fighting climate change by a new Global Peatland Assessment, published in 2022 by UNEP and the Global Peatlands Initiative, of which Wetlands International is a leading member. We are working on it. In 2022, we pushed forward new projects in several countries. With funding from Greenchoice, a Dutch green-energy supplier, we are developing community-based peatland restoration across 180,000 hectares of two very different landscapes: around Lake Junin, high in the Amazon watershed of Peru, and across the steppes of Mongolia.
Over the past two decades, our projects have restored wetlands in 16 countries, including rewetting 22,000 hectares of drained peatlands and rehabilitating 26,000 hectares.
Woman involved in oysterfarming Saloum delta, Senegal
Wetlands International Annual Review 2022
Wetlands International Annual Review 2022
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