STORY HIGHLIGHTS
With our partners in India, we provided emergency relief supplies and training courses on how wetlands management can also create local employment for returning labour migrants. We helped the Orang Asli people in Malaysia’s peatlands establish partnerships with private companies to sell their handicrafts and sponsor ecological restoration. With our partners in Brazil, we provided food and clean water to more than 400 indigenous and traditional communities’ families across the Pantanal. Now is the time to plan and develop along pathways that promote both social and ecological healing and create resilience for both nature and those who depend on it.
SUPPORTING WETLAND COMMUNITIES THROUGH THE PANDEMIC AND ON TO A BLUE-GREEN RECOVERY By Fred Pearce
It was the largest national lockdown in the world. In March 2020, with Covid-19 spreading fast through its cities, India saw tens of millions of poor migrant workers going home to their villages. From Uttarakhand in the north to Bihar in the east and Gujarat in the west, that often meant workers and their families walking hundreds of kilometres back to communities in wetlands. Swollen by the new arrivals, those communities urgently needed basic supplies of food, medicines, personal protection and jobs. But they also needed assistance as people, often for the first time, sought to survive by taking up employment on farms and within wetlands. A humanitarian disaster threatened to turn into a significant surge in demand for natural resources.
Farmers in Kenya and Uganda planted 9,170 trees and bamboo seedlings to help restore the Sio-Siteko transboundary wetland. As schools were temporarily closed due to the outbreak of Covid-19, children joined the practical restoration lessons.
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Wetlands International Annual Review 2020
Wetlands International Annual Review 2020
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