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Wetland cooperation is taking care of water
Tobias Salathé, Senior Advisor, Ramsar Convention Secretariat
I
n the 1960s, when the international environmental movement
started to take shape, it focused as a priority on landscapes
that are fundamental regulators of water regimes. To support
this focus, and to streamline the public awareness, the expert
community created a new term: ‘wetlands’. A single name to focus
on the essence of all water-related ecological systems, natural
and human-made, an obvious term to subsume important land-
scapes known as swamps and marshes, lakes and rivers, wet
grasslands, fens, bogs and other types of peatlands, underground
and karst aquifers, oases, estuaries, deltas and tidal flats, near-
shore marine areas, mangroves and coral reefs, human-made fish
ponds, rice paddies, reservoirs and salt pans.
The understanding of the basic hydrological functions of such
wetlands was crucial to acknowledge the fundamental truth that
our human societies depend on our natural environment, and that
it is wetlands which fulfil the fundamental ecological functions in
this context, notably as regulators of water regimes and as habi-
tats supporting many characteristic species of flora and
fauna. In the early 1970s, UNESCO launched a world-
wide campaign on the wetlands’ ‘liquid assets’ putting
for the first time into the spotlight their great economic,
cultural, scientific and recreational value, the loss of
which would be irreparable.
Migratory bird experts were among the first to
realise the functional connectivity between individual
wetland ecosystems, often aligned along river courses,
and forming together a system of stepping stones across
entire countries and continents. Swan, geese and duck
migrations along their major wetland flyways, tradi-
tionally known by waterfowl hunters, and just about to
be analysed and understood by the first generation of
environmentalists, provided the economic and scien-
tific drivers for the initial focus on wetlands during
the 1960s. This scientific and technical support was
so substantial that it convinced the politicians and
W
ater
C
ooperation
, S
ustainability
and
P
overty
E
radication
Experts visit a floodplain restoration area in Germany where the Kander river enters the Rhine, part of the Transboundary Ramsar Site ‘Oberrhein’
Image: T.Salathé/Ramsar