Twenty years ago Google was founded, Nokia’s mobile phone was cutting edge technology and WWF began scaling up its efforts to conserve the world’s life support systems — wetlands!
Since then, WWF has helped countries to protect 377 wetlands of international importance under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, from the beautiful Bita River in Colombia, with its river dolphins and turtles, to the mangroves of Madagascar and Fiji’s Great Sea Reef. That’s almost 110 million hectares of protected wetlands across the world — an area roughly twice the size of Spain!
It’s an incredible achievement that we have been celebrating over the past week at the Ramsar Conference of the Parties in Dubai. But it is one that few people outside the ‘working on wetlands’ bubble are aware of. Unlike Google’s rise to superpower search engine status over the past two decades. Valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars and officially listed as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary, Google has had a significant impact on the lives of billions of people, particularly its increasingly wealthy shareholders.
But however big it gets, Google will never be as important as wetlands, which are the world’s most valuable ecosystems and essential for life (and business). Just imagine if World Wetland’s Inc were a listed company. Strange thought I know but it would be by far the most valuable company providing trillions of dollars of services each year from water to food and flood protection. And it would boast 7.6 billion shareholders because no matter where you are and what you do, everyone has a vested interest in wetlands.
Keeping rivers, lakes, swamps, peatlands, deltas, mangroves and coral reefs — aka wetlands — healthy is non-negotiable for life as we know it. If we take them, and the biodiversity they support, out of the equation the whole edifice crumbles. Talk about a ‘stock market’ crash.
And the warning signs are flashing. We are very proud of the 110 million hectares we have helped to create and the fact that the Ramsar Convention now boasts the world’s largest network of protected areas. But as a shareholder we are very, very worried and you should be too.
For centuries, the graph charting wetland losses has been heading downwards: around 87% of wetlands have disappeared since 1700. And as the new Global Wetlands Outlook makes clear, we continue to degrade and destroy the world’s wetlands at an alarming rate. And with them our hopes of a sustainable future.
Healthy wetlands are an integral part of the solutions to many of humanity’s most pressing problems and to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. From mitigating climate change to feeding our growing population, from reversing the loss of biodiversity to supplying water to our megacities — we can only tackle these huge challenges by halting the destruction and degradation of the world’s wetlands. But they continue to be undervalued and overlooked.
When a company is heading for bankruptcy, drastic action is the name of the game. It’s the same with World Wetlands Inc. Everyone needs to redouble their efforts to protect and restore wetlands to ensure we have a sustainable long term future.
Some important steps were taken at this week’s COP13 with the Convention’s 170 member states adopting resolutions that help strengthen the foundations for the conservation and wise use of wetlands, particularly the resolution to bolster the Ramsar Advisory Missions — a critical tool to help countries tackle wetland challenges. But more radical steps will be needed.
However much we would like to, there is no way to protect all the world’s wetlands: there will need to be tradeoffs. This will involve hard decisions. Countries will need to prioritize — basing their decisions on the values of their most important wetlands and their potential contribution to commitments under the SDGs and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Critically, Ramsar’s 170 countries — and the others still planning to join — need to demonstrate strong commitment to securing their wetlands. Designating a wetland of international importance means more than drawing some lines on a map and giving them a Ramsar reference number: it’s essential that new and existing sites are protected in practice as well as on paper. Let’s not kid ourselves, commitment requires financial resources far in excess of what has been made available for wetland protection in the last 20 years.
Countries urgently need to start exploring innovative approaches to securing wetlands. These could include rethinking investments that negatively impact Ramsar sites and seizing the opportunities offered by bankable water solutions to protect wetlands. Effective solutions don’t need to be restricted to the national level. In fact, the Ramsar Wetland City Accreditation scheme — an initiative that WWF has supported since its conception — encourage cities that are close to and dependent on wetlands, especially wetlands of international importance, to highlight and strengthen a positive relationship with these valuable ecosystems.
The first 18 cities were accredited during a boisterous ceremony in Dubai, which highlighted the role that city ‘shareholders’ could play — and the commitment of some major urban areas to support the wetlands that sustain them: the six Chinese Wetland cities alone have a combined population of 23 million. And the ambitious goals some have set. For example, the Chinese city of Changde places tremendous value on its wetlands. It already protects 70% of its wetlands and plans to work with WWF to take that up to 80% in the coming years.
As the wetlands community we need to start thinking exponentially. Can we deliver the next 110 million hectares in 10 years or even 5? And can we ensure that they are all well managed and resources. This can only be done with partners that understand the value of wetlands. And these partners do exist, like Danone, which has enjoyed a successful 20-year relationship with the Ramsar Convention. We need to be bold and shift the existing paradigm, like Standard Chartered bank did when it announced that it would “not provide financial services to clients that have operations that are located within, or significantly impact negatively upon wetlands designated under the Ramsar Convention”. That’s a bank with a 1 trillion dollar balance sheet making a commitment because they see value in wetlands.
WWF’s mission is to create a world where people and nature can thrive together — and this can’t happen unless wetlands are understood, valued and truly protected. The Ramsar Convention gives us an opportunity to look towards the future with hope, it provides a framework, tools and advisory missions but it is not enough.
As a shareholder you are going to need to do your bit, whether that’s changing the way your business values the wetlands it depends on, rethinking investment strategies or making an effort to become a Wetland City. Every individual has a role to play, your action could be as simple as taking your family out to visit a Ramsar Site and a Wetland City, they are often some of the most beautiful places on the planet!
And perhaps by the time the Ramsar Convention celebrates its 50th birthday in 2021 — given the necessary effort — we will read a Global Wetland Outlook with more optimistic statistics about the state of the world’s wetlands. And World Wetlands Inc will have turned the corner so that it’s future path for its shareholders is more Google than Nokia. That would be great news for all the species and people that depend on the world’s extraordinary wetlands.
