“At the onset of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration in 2021, the plans and commitments are there. Restoration is an idea whose time has come; investing in land restoration is generally economically profitable, socially acceptable and environmentally desirable.” https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ countries-commit-restore-global-land-area-size- china
The project, which concluded in 2021, has now handed ownership of the barriers to our villager partners. Meanwhile, the government is replicating the approach across Indonesia, and we are working with them, the Asian Development Bank, Ecoshape, and others to help other Asian countries to adopt the Building with Nature approach to tackling water risks along vulnerable coasts. But whatever the scale of our projects, we believe that none will work without full buy-in from the local communities most connected with – and dependent on – wetlands. In Java, our staff spent over a year in local communities, designing the brushwood barriers project, before work began. Villagers did most of the work, and received training and other benefits under our Bio-rights payments system, which offers loans for community development projects that are written off on successful completion of agreed work. Bio-rights has underpinned our work with community organisations across the world for several years now. Our experience shows that it creates mutual respect that helps secure success by combining ecological, communal and livelihood benefits. For us, the resilience of communities is ultimately inseparable from ecosystem resilience.
in Katingan, Central Kalimantan. This work won the 2021 Energy Global Award for our local management partner, Rimba Makmur Utama. International environment agreements give us further avenues for collaboration. We are official partners of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and an associate member of the NDC Partnership, providing parties to the Paris Climate Agreement with expertise to make wetlands conservation and restoration part of their Nationally Determined Contributions to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We also work with engineers – collaborating for instance with Dutch dredging company Boskalis within Ecoshape, a consortium developing natural methods of coastal management. Our flagship Building with Nature Project has been fighting coastal flooding on the Indonesian island of Java. It has worked with local communities and government to install shoreline brushwood barriers to trap silt in which mangrove seeds can take hold. This is improving coastal protection, restoring coastal ecosystems and reviving marine fisheries and aquaculture along 20 kilometres of shore, and has aided more than 10,000 people. We hope our work in the Sahel will ultimately restore 20 million hectares of life-giving wetlands.
Fish traps stand in line along the Mayo Dembé, near Mopti, Mali. With partners, our continued work through the BLiSS initiative will ensure water management is sustained for thriving ecosystems and the communities reliant on their services.
On a similar trans-national scale, we have joined other NGOs, including Rewilding Europe and WWF, in the Dam Removal Europe partnership, which in October joined with the London-based Arcadia Fund to launch a EUR 42 million Open Rivers Programme to tear down obsolete dams and weirs that fragment rivers and block wildlife passage. We have a big task – there are half a million such barriers across the continent’s rivers, one every two kilometres. We team up with other NGOs for global campaigns, too. With IUCN, WWF and others, we coordinate the Global Mangrove Alliance, aimed at increasing mangrove habitat by 20 percent this decade. We also work with Aberystwyth University in Wales on Global Mangrove Watch, a remote sensing tool that gathers real-time data on new threats to existing mangroves. July saw the publication of its first State of the World’s Mangroves report. Similarly, we are a founder of the Global Peatland Initiative, working with scientists at the Greifswald Mire Centre and the London-based conservation investment firm Permian Global. We helped Permian draw up standards for carbon accounting in peatlands, and in 2021 this enabled Permian to sell carbon credits generated by our work protecting and restoring 150,000 hectares of peat-swamp forests
Ibrahim Thiaw Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
Miranda do Douro Dam, Portugal. On the Douro River alone, there are over 1,200 barriers.
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Wetlands International Annual Review 2021
Wetlands International Annual Review 2021
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