At one time every globe, no matter how small, had a speck of blue on it to mark the Aral Sea. Most globes still have that speck – but they should not. The salty Aral Sea, located in the southern part of the former Soviet Union, was once the world’s fourth largest lake; since 1960, however, it has shrunk by almost a half, and in 1989 it actually split in two. Over 90 per cent of the water that used to flow into the sea is now being diverted, mainly to irrigate cotton plantations. What remains is expected to decrease by a further third before the end of the decade.
Elsewhere, the story has been similar. In the US, wetlands have been vanishing at an average rate of about 600 hectares a day since colonial times – an amount that currently stands at about 5 per cent of the total land mass. Forty per cent of Japan’s tidal flats have been destroyed since 1945. And some European wet-lands have fared even worse. Greek Macedonia, in the northern part of the country, has lost 94 per cent of its marshland since 1930, leaving a meagre 56 square kilometres. Conservationists, gripped by gloom, estimate that by the turn of the century there may be a mere handful of Mediterranean wetlands left if nothing is done.
Now, ecologists are at last beginning to persuade governments to preserve wetlands – and, in some cases, even to restore lost sites – though the annual balance remains in debit. A major incentive in these schemes is money. In recent years, wetland conservationists have been supplementing traditional arguments for saving habitats, based on the preservation of wildlife and aesthetics, with something altogether more hard-nosed: economics. In the past, conservationists may have played on the value of tourism and bird-watching, but now their economic appraisals of wetlands are far more sophisticated, taking into account the practical uses of wetlands, such as reduction of flood damage, improvement of water quality, recharging of underground water and fisheries production.
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Global impact
This increasingly broad definition of worth means that countries everywhere are coming to value their wetlands, says Joseph Larson, director of the Environmental Institute at the University of Massachusetts, and chair of the US committee for Ramsar, the international organisation that monitors wetlands (see ‘A model for cooperation?’). And the impact is especially big in developing countries. ‘Politicians used to think people were fighting for wetlands because they wanted places where rich people from the North could go to watch birds,’ says Larson. ‘Now they realise that wetlands could be valuable sources of food, fuel and fibre, as well as performing a host of other useful functions.’
One site in Europe where this approach is being adopted is the Donana National Park. Situated on the southern, Atlantic coast of Spain, west of Gibraltar, more than half of the 50 000 hectare national park consists of inland marshes. For three decades, pressures from economic activities outside the park – particularly farming and tourism – steadily destroyed much of this wetland habitat and polluted what remained. The situation was alleviated in 1989, when 54 000 hectares of land surrounding Donana were designated as a ‘natural park’. With the refilling of some of its dried-out lagoons to restore the area’s ecological character, there has been a growing influx of ornithologists and ecotourists. This has allowed several local farmers to diversify, earning a living from tourists rather than draining the wetlands. But the measure proved inadequate to reverse the trend of destruction.
Then, in 1992, the regional government invited a group of Spanish academics and international advisers to assess the economics of the area. Their report concluded: ‘From the economic point of view, there is a mismatch between the high quality of the surroundings of Donana and the type of use which is currently made of its resources.’
They recommended that the future lay not in water-thirsty agriculture or in mass tourism but in small-scale, environmentally sensitive recreation and local crafts and produce. ‘Persistence with the current economic model,’ they argued, ‘will lead in the medium term to a crisis . . . a change from an opportunist and speculative growth model to a model of sustainable development is urgently needed.’ With the politicians convinced by these arguments, changes are under way, but civil engineers and the technocrats who control water management in and around the park must be persuaded before Donana’s future is secured.
The general shift in thinking about wetlands has its roots in a report published in 1983 by Paul Adamus, a private consultant working for the Federal Highways Administration in the US. Drawing on scientific disciplines as diverse as microbiology and civil engineering, Adamus highlighted a whole range of wetland functions, from anchoring shorelines, trapping nitrates and phosphates from fertilisers and purifying sewage, to recreational uses such as hunting and birdwatching. Wetlands, Adamus concluded, are more than just ‘restaurants and runways for migratory waterbirds’; they are important for the health, safety and welfare of human society.
‘It was a turning point,’ says Larson. He explains that Adamus came up with a way of evaluating the functions a wetland performs that could be used successfully even by nonspecialists. It allows a qualitative analysis of any site through assessment of some of its physical attributes, such as its structure and how the water is distributed, and the presence or absence of various plants and animals. Since then, economists have devised ways of evaluating these various functions. ‘It was being able to assess the enormous economic value of wetlands,’ says Larson, ‘that made politicians start to listen.’
Following Adamus’s report, the National Wetlands Policy Forum was established in 1988. This brought together a wide range of groups, including both users and abusers of wetlands. In 1989, George Bush pledged, on behalf of the NWPF, that there would be no further net loss of wetlands in the US. It was proposed to do this in three ways; by conserving existing wetlands, by restoring those that have been lost, and, most controversially, by creating new ones. Progress in the US has not been easy. In the past few years the loss of wetlands has merely slowed, from about 34 000 to 20 300 hectares a year. Despite this, other countries are starting to adopt this policy, and launch their own schemes.
In Nigeria, for example, a team of British academics from University College London and the University of Cambridge recently completed an evaluation of the economics of the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands in the northeast of the country. Their study looked at fish production, availability of firewood, cattle grazing on flood plains and other assets that planners tend to ignore. They found that the net economic benefits per cubic metre of water were 30 times greater in the wetlands than in the costly irrigation scheme into which water was being diverted.
River reprieved
A year ago, the Nigerian government signed a contract to build a dam at Kafin Zaki, on the largest river feeding the wetlands. This would have created a huge reservoir and an irrigated area of 840 square kilometres, drying out the remaining wetlands. But at the beginning of February, the government cancelled the entire contract, blaming a shortage of funds. The long-term future of the project remains uncertain. In the meantime, however, the conservationists have won over the major international funding organisations that for years have financed huge civil engineering projects that damage wetlands worldwide.
Michael Horowitz, visiting research fellow at the World Bank, believes that the report published by the academics on 11 May extends far beyond Nigeria. ‘This research,’ he says, ‘not only demonstrates the economic value of wetlands whose continued productivity is threatened by the management of large dams and irrigation structures, but also persuasively proposes a ‘win-win’ solution in terms of an alternative water management strategy.’
Unfortunately, this type of economic analysis has come too late to save many wetlands. For hundreds of years governments worldwide have undermined the real value of wetlands with offers of grants and subsidies to destroy them. Even in the US farmers were paid to drain land until 1985. But now the NWPF has shown that by redirecting subsidies to conservation ends, wetlands can be recreated, leading to greater long-term economic benefits as well as protecting vulnerable ecosystems for posterity. Between 1990 and 1992, around 244 000 hectares of US wetlands were restored.
Reversing the trend
Other countries are now following suit. In 1992, Scandinavian countries were un-dertaking 37 projects restoring a total of 127 square kilometres of wetlands. That same year, 13 other countries – Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania and Senegal – all had restoration schemes under way.
On the Skjern A River in Denmark, for example, scientists have begun recreating wetlands and dismantling a major agricultural drainage project less than five years after it was completed. The original project aimed to increase agricultural productivity by draining large tracts of land along the river. But within a few years it ran into difficulties. Iron deposits in the exposed soil became oxidised, poisoning the land. Also, with no buffer zone to trap excess fertilisers from farmland, wetlands at the river’s mouth became polluted and toxic algal blooms started to appear. In 1987, with fish and bird populations dwindling, the Danish parliament asked the National Forest and Nature Agency to draw up an emergency plan. Now they are seven years into a 10-year programme that will recreate the lost wetlands at a cost of £12.5 million. Restoring the ecosystem will help conserve wildlife, but it will also create new recreation opportunities and re-establish the once lucrative local fishing industry.
Planners in Britain have also recognised the value of lost wetlands. Much of Britain’s coast was once lined with marshes. At high tide and during storms they broke the power of waves, reducing damage inland. But following the Second World War much of this marginal land was turned over to agriculture. Coastal marshes were drained and sea walls erected for flood defence. Britain now pays £300 million each year to shore up these defences.
Recent studies show that the cost of sea defences could be reduced twelve-fold if sea walls are built behind 80 metres of salt marshes. In an experiment begun by English Nature and the National Rivers Authority in 1991, the National Trust agreed to use Northey Island in Essex as a test site. ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´s from the Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies at the University of Hull dismantled a sea wall, and rebuilt a smaller wall 75 metres inland, allowing the land between to revert to salt marshland.
English Nature is impressed with the first results. ‘They’ve successfully established a salt marsh in two years,’ says Richard Leafe, coastal geomorphologist with English Nature. He points out that the new wetlands are created from poor quality farmland and that this represents a far more valuable use of the shoreline. ‘This is a good example of how economics and nature conservation can work together,’ says Leafe. English Nature is now conducting a larger scale experiment near Tollesbury on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, not far from Northey Island. ‘We’d like to see 750 acres of salt marshes and mud flats restored in this way every year,’ says Leafe, ‘as much as is being lost by erosion and rising sea levels.’
On the Indus delta in Pakistan, the tides are tamed by mangrove swamps. Like the salt marshes in Essex, these serve a variety of functions and are crucial to the livelihoods of the local people. Shrimps, which make up around two-thirds of Pakistan’s fish exports, spend part of their life in the swamps. And the mangroves trap silt which would otherwise clog up important shipping channels. But damming of the river upstream and local use of mangroves for firewood have resulted in the loss of around 100 000 hectares – more than a third – of swampland over the past three years. Now international and local groups are joining forces to replant the mangroves and restore this invaluable habitat.
Conservation and regeneration are the mainstays for wetland ecologists, but their most ambitious schemes now aim to create new sites where none existed before. These can offer a cheap and effective alternative to some much clumsier engineering schemes. In Sweden, for example, water meadows created by the County Administration Board in Halland have successfully reduced nitrate fertiliser pollution of the Kattegat, a shallow channel between Sweden and Denmark. This pollution had been causing the growth of toxic algae. Creating the meadows cost just 2 per cent of the cost of a conventional treatment system capable of stripping the same amount of nitrate.
In Britain, wetland-creation schemes are getting off to a more modest start. In a suburb of London, scientists are trying to create urban wetlands as a way of tackling city pollution. The site is the Pyl Brook river, a tributary of the Thames in Sutton. In the late 1980s, when a local shopping centre was pedestrianised, a surface-water drain was built to remove rainwater runoff and prevent flooding in low-lying shops. The drain collects storm water from the centre of Sutton, including runoff from streets and car parks polluted by wastes, oil, grease, asbestos, animal faeces and metals. At the same time, Thames Water Authority dug a 10 000-cubic-metre pond to store the storm water before it emptied into the river.
Soon after, the London Borough of Sutton planted the pond with reeds. Their main aim was to create a wildlife habitat and a place for local schoolchildren to do nature studies, but they have found that this new wetland has other uses. For example, it strips the water of almost all nitrates and phosphates, as well as over half the polluting metals. It also eliminates most coliform bacteria from animal faeces and illegal sewage inputs. Not surprisingly, the NRA is interested in these findings.
With a three-pronged attack – conservation, restoration of lost wetlands and creation of new ones – wetlands experts are confident that at last the tide of prejudice and ignorance is starting to turn. Yet there is little room for complacency. Even in the most enlightened countries, the rate of loss of wetlands is only now beginning to decline.
Ted Hollis is a reader in geography in the Wetland Research Unit at University College London. James Bedding is a freelance journalist.
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A model for cooperation?
The international intergovernmental treaty for wetlands conservation is the Ramsar Convention. Set up in 1971, it now has 80 signatories and something of the status of an international body. Signatories list sites within their borders believed to be of international significance and promise to make ‘wise use’ of all their wetlands. Currently, around 650 wetlands are listed, covering a total of 43 million hectares, an area fractionally smaller than Sweden.
The convention relies entirely on goodwill and has no means of penalising those countries that fail to conserve ‘protected’ sites. ‘Ironically, Ramsar’s success may be because it does not have strong teeth,’ says Michael Moser, director of the International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. ‘It has so far worked by consensus and by providing positive tools for wetland conservation, rather than by division and enforcement of restrictive measures.’
Others disagree. ‘It’s a friendly convention, but friendship can be abused,’ says Chris Tydeman, head of the British conservation programme for the WorldWide Fund for Nature. This point was made all too clearly at the last triennial conference in Kushiro, Japan. There, the host country carefully concealed engineering plans that would destroy its own wetlands (‘Japan ‘forgets’ giant canal’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ´´, 12 June 1993). Japan is by no means the only culprit. All 11 of Greece’s Ramsar sites, for example, appear on the organisation’s list of the 44 most threatened wetlands in the world. Despite receiving repeated criticism from Ramsar, Greece has failed even to map the sites properly.
One problem is that monitoring of wetlands, either by member governments or by Ramsar is limited. Ramsar staff do visit wetlands listed on their ‘Montreux record’ – those in member countries that are under great threat. But these visits are infrequent and the subsequent reports are often ignored. Tyde-man believes that Ramsar needs more money for monitoring and should use independent experts.
Contradictory policies represent the greatest threat to Ramsar’s aims. While conservationists within a government are working to protect wetlands, engineers may be busily destroying them. ‘What’s lacking in many cases is a national wetlands policy,’ says Laurence Rose, head of international legislation at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
One of the worst offenders, says Rose, is the European Union. ‘While it is officially committed to protecting wetlands, other arms of the machine continue to give money to projects that destroy them.’ One such plan, now under consideration by the European Commission is Spain’s National Hydrological Plan, which would mean the construction of 278 new dams and the diversion of water to arid areas, at a cost of around $15 billion. Rose believes that the EU could learn from the example of some of Ramsar’s poorer members, particularly Uganda and Bulgaria.
But coherent policies alone will not protect such sites. The Ramsar Wetland Conservation Fund, established in 1990 to help poorer members, is desperately short of money. The fund’s annual target is $1 million, but for the period 1993 to 1996 Ramsar has budgeted only a fifteenth of this amount. Wealthier members seem unmoved by calls for funds, but now help for wetlands could come from another quarter.
The Biodiversity Convention, drawn up in Rio in 1992, was finally ratified last December. Money to finance the convention is expected to come through the Global Environment Facility, the major fund established through the World Bank and UN Development Programme for large-scale environmental projects. Conservationists see this as a unique opportunity for wet-lands, and are pressing for Ramsar to be given the task of coordinating the wetlands conservation programme. ‘It should boost the conservation of wetlands, and it could do a lot to strengthen Ramsar,’ says Tydeman.
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Cranes like it wet
One of the most remarkable animals threatened by the destruction of wetlands in Asia is India’s Sarus crane (Grus antigone), the world’s tallest flying bird, growing to around 1.5 metres in height.
In the 1960s, Sarus cranes were widely distributed in India, from Gujarat in the west to Assam in the east and from Himachal Pradesh in the north, and south to Maharashtra (see Map). But surveys carried out in the 1980s indicate that this range has now been halved and that the current population is just 12 000.
In 1989, Prakash Gole from the Ecological Society of Pune in Maharashtra, surveyed some 20 000 square kilometres of land to assess the status of the Sarus crane. He found only two states, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, with Sarus strongholds. And even here there are problems.
Nationally the ratio of juvenile to adult cranes is unusually low – just 12 per cent – but in Uttar Pradesh it is even worse. Exactly why juveniles are becoming so scarce is still unclear. But one likely problem is that their food is of a specialised kind – certain water insects and invertebrates – which are prone to accumulating environmental toxins in the agricultural land that now makes up more than 75 per cent of Uttar Pradesh. Another is that Sarus are slow breeders, producing just one or two chicks each year.
Experts disagree on how fast wetlands are disappearing on the Indian plains and on how much wetland is left. But the pressure on these habitats from human population growth is undeniable. Official figures show that between 1951 and 1981, India’s population expanded from 361 million to 685 million. The need to feed these people is paramount.
It is certainly clear that of the vast areas of wetland that stretched across the North Indian plains 50 years ago, many have vanished. Jheels, a Hindi word for medium-sized, shallow, rainfed depressions – a favourite habitat for Sarus and other waterbirds – have virtually disappeared, most having been drained and converted into agricultural land. Moreover, the remaining wetlands are increasingly being used for fishing, poaching, cultivation of aquatic plants and transport. Biological productivity has also been reduced by pollution and infestations of aquatic weeds such as the water hyacinth.
Sarus cranes are not the only waterbirds in difficulty. The midwinter waterfowl counts, now conducted annually by the International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau (IWRB) the Asian Wetland Bureau and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) have highlighted the decline of the blacknecked stork (Ephippiorhynchus asiaticus) – a large, black-and-white stork with a massive black bill and long, coral-red legs.
During the first IWRB Asian waterfowl count, in 1987, only 33 blacknecked storks were observed in 169 wetlands. Since then the number of wetlands included in the survey has increased, but, ominously, the number of birds counted has stayed more or less the same. Most ecologists blame the decline on wetland destruction, tree-felling (which removes their nesting sites), trapping for zoos and thinning of the shells of their eggs, due to pesticides.
What, if anything, can be done to reverse this trend? In 1992, the Indian government – a signatory of the Ramsar Convention increased its Ramsar sites from two to six, adding to its list Wular Lake in Kashmir, Harike Lake in Punjab, Sambhar Lake in Rajasthan and Logtak Lake in Manipur. But this may not do much for the Sarus and blacknecked storks, partly because they breed in a scattered fashion, often outside conservation areas.
The answer may be to think simple. According to Gole, the building and maintaining of village ponds should be encouraged. But in the north Indian plains, the prospects for implementing simple environmental practices may soon be dashed by the advance of high-technology farming. The green revolution has already swept through the Punjab and Haryana. Now rural Uttar Pradesh is changing, its landscape becoming criss crossed by concrete-lined irrigation canals. Existing wetlands may soon be drained and brought under the plough. Sarus and blacknecked storks continue to eke out an existence. But for how long?