Feb 01, 2023
As World Wetlands Day arrives to focus our attention on protecting the planet’s most threatened ecosystem, a new Climate Investment Funds’ enabled restoration project in Africa’s Zambezi River Basin may provide a model for future hope.
Wetlands are critically important areas of water-saturated land areas. They include marshes, peatlands, swamps, mangroves, estuaries, lagoons, and floodplains and they do much to protect us from catastrophic climate change impacts. Peatlands alone, covering just 3% of our planet, sequester about 30% of land-based carbon. Nearly a third of all usable freshwater is found in wetlands and just one acre can absorb 1.5million gallons of floodwater – a service set to become ever more vital in the years ahead.
However, human-caused climate change has enacted a severe toll. 35% of global wetlands have been lost in recent decades. 81% of inland wetland species are in decline as are 36% of all coastal and marine wetland species. Although a billion livelihoods are sustained by them and at least 3.5 billion people are fed by wetland rice paddies, the degradation continues. Not just through climate change but by unsustainable land management practices; draining and filling wetlands to make way for agriculture is common.
This year’s World Wetlands Day is calling for us to revive and restore our degraded wetlands across the globe.
How do we protect our Wetlands?
Nature-based solutions provide a way forward.
Science increasingly favors harnessing nature to mitigate for climate change - an effective alternative to engineering because there’s less environmental impact. Encouraging the growth of mangrove forests, which are known to protect coastal communities from storm surges may be preferable to building sea walls for instance.
CIF’s Nature, People and Climate (NPC) investment program was conceived to not only harness nature’s power, but also to enable Indigenous communities, the people most at risk from extreme weather events, to lead in driving climate change solutions.
The design of the NPC program recognizes the complex interrelationships between land use, climate change and people. It aims to finance scaled-up support packages to protect, restore, and connect a diversity of ecosystems across multiple landscapes including wetlands.
The first region to benefit from the Program is south central Africa’s Zambezi River Basin, where 30,000 hectares of degraded wetlands will be restored. Some 47 million people living along its watercourse, many hugely dependent on agriculture, are increasingly threatened by destructive floods, decreased crop yields, and deadly droughts.
The CIF can help. By protecting the Zambezi’s headwaters, forests, and wetlands, communities can adapt, protect livelihoods, and simultaneously help to mitigate climate change.
