COASTS & DELTAS 2030 GLOBAL GOAL
Coasts & Deltas
Two years into our strategic intent, we already made significant progress towards the definition of landscape/ seascape development plans, which will drive the integration of sustainable production of wetland commodities into the broader supply chain of agriculture and aquaculture products, enhancing community resilience
Watch (GMW) platform. This report and GMW are key elements in our upscaling strategy to safeguard mangroves beyond activities in which we are directly involved, and to support policymakers and practitioners in planning, monitoring, and managing mangrove and related policies. We developed and implemented a blue carbon site selection process, and we prepared pre-feasibility assessments for blue carbon landscapes in Panama, Colombia, Indonesia, and Malaysia with corporate partners, along with dialogues on responsible carbon financing according to the mitigation hierarchy. We supported the government of South Korea with the listing of the 128,411 ha Getbol, Korean tidal flats under criteria of the World Heritage Convention. The site was officially added to the World Heritage List by UNESCO in July 2021, strengthening its protection status and stepping up conservation efforts and future investment. We joined forces with the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership to help government partners in the Yellow Sea adopt conservation and restoration guidance of intertidal wetlands. We worked with stakeholders to highlight the relevance of adopting the Paraná Delta Biodiversity Corridor Strategy which includes over 30 protected private and public areas that enable corridors for wildlife. The National Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development has incorporated the strategy within their priorities for the Paraná Delta.
Resilient wetland communities
Our goal is to safeguard and restore coastal wetland ecosystems as essential features of resilient and productive coastal landscapes. We will achieve our goal by tailoring our work to the different contexts we typically encounter in our target areas, ranging from heavily degraded or modified coastal areas to intact wetland landscapes.
We supported government partners in China, Philippines, and Indonesia to adopt guidelines for Ecological Mangrove Restoration as part of their strategies that will ultimately drive restoration of over 500,000 ha. This will support a shift from often unsuccessful mass-planting approaches to more inclusive community-based restoration strategies than can be scaled up across coastal landscapes. We provided technical support to the official drafting of a Regulatory Decree for Victoria´s Multiple Use Reserve Planning Committee in support of the Paraná Delta wetland conservation (272,000 ha). This builds on earlier activities with local stakeholders to adapt island cattle raising, tourism, and real estate development so that it helps restore habitats for fishing, beekeeping, marsh deer, capybara, and emblematic migratory birds. With key funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency we launched a three- year initiative called Source to Sea in Eastern Africa. This aims to upscale approaches to combat the drivers of wetland and biodiversity loss, in the Rift valley lakes and Eastern Africa mangrove ecoregions. The areas comprised are the Ziway-Shalla sub-basin in Ethiopia and the Omo-Turkana basins spreading across a large part of southwestern Ethiopian highlands and northern Kenya. The Lamu land and seascape covers an area of 627,310 ha and extends from the Kenya-Somali border to the Tana River with mangrove coverage of 60,000 ha; and the Rufiji Delta comprising the wider Rufiji, Mafia, Kilwa seascape, which represents 70% of Tanzania’s mangroves covering a total of 54,000 ha and internationally significant intertidal areas and coral reefs. In Guinea-Bissau, we developed plans to reinforce wetlands-dependent community livelihoods in the Cacheu National Park (88,064 ha), the Cantanhez National Park (120,987 ha) and their respective buffer zones, and we aim to further expand this work in the proposed Jeta-Pecixe- Cacheu landscape (423,475 ha).
Coasts & Deltas
Reduced climate risks
Coasts & Deltas Healthy wetlands
We continued the development of the Building with Nature Asia initiative, a programme that seeks to leverage investment in Nature-based Solutions to increase the resilience of 30 million vulnerable people in cities and settlements along vulnerable coasts and rivers by 2030 across the continent. We engaged government actors in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and India in sessions to design the programme and continued with the finetuning of actual propositions for investment in selected landscapes in the target countries. Together with other Global Mangrove Alliance members, we started the development of a set of guidelines on mangrove restoration. These consolidate existing high- quality guidance and include modules covering different restoration targets, including carbon sequestration, coastal defence, sustainable aquaculture development, and fisheries enhancement. The modules seek to promote large-scale adoption of ecological mangrove restoration principles.
For protected areas in The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia we supported government partners to develop plans for sustainable management of over 400,000 ha of mangroves and other coastal wetlands. In the development of these plans, we facilitated the involvement of community groups and other stakeholders. Currently, we are connecting these ‘landscape partners’ to collectively scale up conservation, restoration and livelihood interventions. Through the To-Plant-Or-Not-To-Plant initiative, we restored 758 ha of mangroves using Ecological Mangrove Restoration principles, and attracted significant upscaling investment interest in Guinea-Bissau, Philippines, and Indonesia. We took initial steps to develop landscape- scale restoration and management plans that will ultimately result in the restoration of tens of thousands of ha worldwide. This includes restoring 2,500 ha in Guinea-Bissau with support from our corporate partner Greenchoice to achieve climate, community, and biodiversity impact. We published the first State of the World’s Mangroves report in June 2021 with our Global Mangrove Alliance partners, using updated data from the Global Mangrove
By 2030, we aim to safeguard 2 million hectares of high value coastal wetlands, including those sites which make up vital wildlife migration corridors.
With 9 years remaining until 2030, we already have opportunities under development and concrete plans to restore and safeguard approximately 1.5 million ha and have initial leads to expand our work in additional countries
By 2030, we aim to mainstream Building with Nature and promote blue carbon solutions, influencing EUR 10 billion of investments in coastal infrastructure solutions.
By 2030, we aim to integrate wetlands into 8 million hectares of coastal production systems.
Inspired by our work on ecological mangrove restoration and Building with Nature, we received significant attention from the private sector, providing numerous opportunities for (carbon) investment toward wetland restoration
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Wetlands International Annual Review 2021
Wetlands International Annual Review 2021
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