Wetlands Conservation Research Paper

Wetlands cover about 7.8× 10⁶ km² , or 6 percent of the world’s surface, and are found in every climatic zone from the tundra mires to the tropical mangroves. They are highly fragmented and diverse, and with only a few exceptions (e.g., the Everglades, the Fenland, the Dutch polders, and major river deltas and lower valley bottoms) they rarely cover large stretches of land. Their diversity has been simplified and commonalities emphasized into the marine and estuarine wetlands of the coast, and the riverine, lacustrine, and palustrine of the interior (Cowardin et al. 1985, National Re-search Council 1995).

The need to conserve wetlands arises from their continuous and increasing conversion and loss. In the past, wetlands were considered wastelands, neither sound land nor good water, and therefore drained for agriculture, dredged-out for harbors or marinas, filled-in for urban or industrial purposes, or used as dumps for domestic and industrial waste. Conversion reached high proportions from c.1830 to 1960, when modern earthmoving machinery made excavation easy, steam (and later diesel and electrical) pumps lifted vast quantities of water over embankments, and the mass manufacture of clay tile drains and pipes made boggy ground firm. It is difficult to give precise figures as the process of the manipulation of hydrology is at least pre-Medieval in Europe (Darby 1983, Lambert 1985) and Asia (Ruddle 1987), and equally as ancient in the Americas (Denevan 1992). It is also difficult to define ‘drained’—is it totally dry, flooded for a month, seasonally, or what? But of the estimated 1606 10 ha of land drained globally, 42 percent is in North America, 24 percent in Europe, 8 percent in Russia, and 20 percent in the South East Asian deltas, which leaves an infinitesimal amount of 6 percent in Africa and South America. Large as it is, however, it is still a mere fifth of the global total, the great bulk of which lies in the tundra wetlands, and to a lesser degree in the temperate coastal marshes and the tropical lowlands of the Amazon and Congo basins.

But since the early 1960s the beneficial, positive values of these productive ecosystems have been recognized increasingly. For example, their hydro-logical physical functions include flood mitigation, coastal protection, recharging aquifers, and sediment trapping. Chemical functions include pollution trap-ping, removal of toxic residues, and waste recycling, while biological functions include biomass production and wildlife habitats. The socioeconomic consumptive benefits include food production, fuel from organic soils, fiber from hardwood forests, mangroves and reed swamps, and everywhere fish, fowl and fauna. But, perhaps above all else, it is the hard-to-quantify nonconsumptive benefits that have dominated the urge to conserve, and these include scenic, recreational, educational, aesthetic, archaeological, scientific, heritage, and historical benefits that abound in an environment where air, land, and water, and their fauna and flora, meet in an attractive and delicate way that has caught scientific and popular imagination.

Regret at the loss of game after reclamation was more than outweighed by pride in the creation of productive agricultural landscapes. Yet, paradoxically, the first concerted effort towards conservation came in the United States from the hunting lobby, aided by recreational and wildlife enthusiasts, with the active support of the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Under the Migratory Birds Hunting and Conservation Act of 1934 the FWS had the right to sell ‘duck stamps’ which were purchased by all wildfowl hunters. Between 1934 and 1984 over $250 million was collected, the bulk being used to purchase 970,000 ha of waterfowl habitats, mostly wetland. In addition, the private duck-hunting lobby—‘Ducks Unlimited’ (with 600,000 members)—has raised funds ($400 million since 1937), and has purchased, created or manages over 100,000 ha of wetlands, and carried out a sustained campaign of lobbying and advertising, which has been echoed by the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy Council.

After about 1960, the loss of wildfowl habitats alone was calculated to be about 121,000 ha yr. Rising public awareness of their scenic recreational attractions, and positive natural functions, led to public support for their conservation. Intellectual curiosity about wetlands had also been stimulated by integrated ecological studies, and research centers were established, such as the Center for Wetland Resources at the State University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and the Center for Wetlands at Florida University.

In addition, it was realized that the US Army Corps of Engineers (which regulated navigable rivers and coastal waters used in interstate commerce under the River and Harb or Act of 1899) was dredging annually about 300×10⁶m² of sediment out of coastal channels and navigable waterways and then backfilling the material in other wetlands to make land suitable for urban residential development and marinas.

The federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 allowed all states bordering the ocean and the Great Lakes to apply for federal grants for wetland preservation, provided they adopted strict land use and purchasing regulations. Coastal zone management plans were devised, which either prohibited coastal developments or allowed changes only by special permit (e.g., San Francisco Bay).

In time concern extended to the interior freshwater wetlands as toxic wastes were dumped in swamps, open space near urban areas was lost, and agriculturalists drained and infilled wildlife habitats, which incensed the powerful hunting, fishing and birdwatching lobby. But there was no legislation to control loss, although the regulation of water quality was possible.

Meanwhile in 1972, the Corps of Engineers was made responsible for regulating the discharge of dredged material under Section 404 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Environmentalists argued that this implied total wetland protection, an interpretation resisted by the Corps, which argued that its responsibility did not extend to the headwaters of rivers where many wetlands were situated. Nevertheless, after legal action by environmental groups, the responsibility had to be admitted, and the Act was strengthened in 1977 (now called the Clean WaterAct). From now on ‘all the waters of the United States’ were included, which was a legal and not a scientific concept. In addition, schemes for coastal and river alteration by the Corps could only occur after review and approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the FWS and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the EPA having an absolute veto over the use of any sites to be used for the dumping of dredged material.

Executive Order 11990 of 1977 required every federal agency ‘to minimize the destruction, loss, or degradation of wetlands’ by avoiding support of any new construction in wetlands. But coordination be-tween agencies is poor and responsibility divided. The Corps, for example, is responsible only for those waters affected by interstate commerce, which excludes much of the coastal and nearly all inland waters. In addition, while it cannot dump dredged material in those wetlands it does control, it cannot regulate their reclamation. This explains the current massive conversion of the Mississippi River bottom-lands, stimulated by the impetus of high crop prices.

It is clear too, that some federal policies, e.g., legislation dealing with agricultural tax credits, subsidies, and soil conservation has actually encouraged wetland destruction. Since 1985, however, the Food Security Act (under its ‘Swampbuster’ provisions), linked eligibility of farm subsidy benefits directly with what farmers did with their wetlands, preservation being rewarded and conversion being penalized. In addition, farm debts could be exchanged for con- version of land back to wetland. Increasingly, the link between the financial encouragement of agriculture and the destruction of wetlands is being realized.

Thus, although greater awareness of wetland protection is coming about, losses are still occurring. Annually, about 20,200 ha of coastal wetlands are still being converted, but over 100,000 ha in the un- regulated inland wetlands, primarily for agriculture. The battle is far from won. Success will not come until the traditional approach to protection via either land use or water quality legislation is abandoned. Neither of these recognizes that it is the combination of land and water that is the unique characteristic of wetlands.

Compared to the United States, where wetlands have ‘achieved divine status’ (Kwong 1998), the same degree of awareness and concern about wetland loss, and hence protection, has not characterized the countries of Europe. Fragmentation of political units, the lack of a politically powerful or numerous hunting lobby, broadly ‘rural’ as opposed to environmental concerns, and the overwhelming dominance of food production and self-sufficiency as national goals, supported particularly by the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, have been the over- whelming characteristics of rural policy. Furthermore, a common awareness that centuries, if not millennia, of human manipulation have altered the European countryside and its soils, hydrology, and flora to its present state have been a corrective to any excessively sentimental notions of a ‘pristine’ nature.

Agricultural draining accounts for the bulk of the possible 300,000 ha lost annually, and there is now considerable awareness of the need to conserve the last remaining pieces of wetland. Most large-scale con- versions, as in the Fens and Holland, are over, and it is tile draining that is nibbling away at the edges of the remaining freshwater wetlands, the filling-in of farm ponds that are perceived as redundant, and the draining of small areas of coastal salt marshes. But some coastal areas are under threat, e.g., around Brittany and adjacent coasts that total over 500,000 ha, the Camargue and Etangs de Languedoc-Rousillon (170,000 ha) on the Mediterranean, the latter already radically altered in places by tourist development and marinas. Another unknown is the fate of the Shannon estuary in The Republic of Ireland, where large-scale industrial developments are proposed. In Ireland over 100,000 ha of peat bogs have been drained and water tables lowered prior to peat extraction, and the lowland raised bogs of Ireland and western Scotland have been severely reduced by afforestation schemes.

Actual losses are difficult to quantify because of fugitive and fragmentary sources. In total, perhaps as much as 615,135 ha were drained in France (5.2 per cent of the country) between 1970 and 1982 alone, and probably as much as 1,418,000 ha of Ireland (24.3 per cent of the country) between 1945 and 1980, of which nearly four-fifths was field drainage. In total, perhaps as much as half of the lowland fens and mires in France and the United Kingdom have been destroyed or damaged. Another measure of change is the number of species endangered or threatened. For example, 47 percent of all European bird species, all 111 of European Union breeding species of reptiles and amphibians, and 2,000 plant species are in decline.

Preservationist measures must be directed at the main culprit, agriculture and its support. In the past, CAP payments have provided generous subsidies for ‘improvement’ to boost production, particularly in the Less Favoured Areas which include, for example, the wetlands of western Ireland, the Islands and Highlands of Scotland, and parts of Mediterranean France and Italy. In addition support for farm improvement has been accompanied by support for prices. But since the later 1980s gross over-production, high storage costs of surpluses, adverse public opinion, and the drain that the CAP is having on the Community’s finances has caused a reevaluation. Milk and food production quotas, set-aside schemes, reflooding to recreate wet-lands, have all been undertaken. More significantly, the recognition of the unique fauna and flora in wetlands, and their place in the intercontinental migratory flight paths has led to their declaration as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Britain, or Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) there and elsewhere throughout the EU. Birds, newts, and unusual plants are becoming the key to their preservation in a newly environmentally conscious society.

The complex infrastructure of legislation, legal precedent, scientific knowledge and active conservation groups has little counterpart in the less developed world. The need to expand food production in line with rising population have always made wetlands attractive potential farmland. In the past, at least 45,000 km² of the Sundarbans of the Ganges– Brahmaputra delta, and the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, and Mekong deltas have been transformed by millions of peasant settlers, and are only the most visible examples of a much greater process continuously at work along the entire coastline of South and Southeast Asia (Richards 1991). In more recent decades, foreign technological aid and capital inputs (especially large multi-purpose dams, barrages, canals, etc.) have often misjudged the physical capabilities and properties of wetlands. They have also ignored the traditional, indigenous, polycultural systems of agriculture– livestock–aquaculture which are sustainable, low energy-using, and frequently offer better returns than agricultural conversion. Large-scale schemes like the Kafue Gorge dam in Zambia, and the Jonglei canal across a bend in the Upper Nile, Sudan, have been highly controversial, and it is doubtful if their benefits have outweighed those of the systems they destroyed. The diseconomies of rapidly initiated and capital-intensive schemes are not confined to Western intervention. The government-sponsored transmigration schemes of Indonesia to move millions of farmers from Java to the outer islands will affect c. 200,000 km of coastal wetlands. But soils are frequently nutrient-deficient, dry out too rapidly and shrink, and will not sustain the hoped-for intensive double cropping of rice. Rather, they need polycultural horticulture, planted with great sensitivity to local conditions.

Many interior wetlands are threatened in tropical Africa and South America, as are coastal tidal peats and mangroves in South and Southeast Asia. For example, in Africa there are some 224,000 km of lightly used riverine flats (mostly papyrus marsh that seasonal flooding almost doubles in size) along the Nile, Niger, Zaire, and Zambesi rivers, as well as the Okavango basin. Similarly vulnerable are the flood-able Gran Panatal on the upper reaches of the Rio Paraquai (c.100,000 km ) and the flood plains of the Apure–Aranca tributaries of the Orinoco in Venezuela (c.70,000 km ). The wetlands of the Amazon are incalculable.

Finally, the impetus to international cooperation over the conservation of wetlands has come once more through the preservation of wildfowl habitats, the one positive function that all parties can perceive, appreciate and agree upon. The Ramsar convention (1971) aims to protect Wetlands of International Importance, specifically for birds, and in 1980 the Cagliari conference widened the definition to include any endangered plant or animal species. An inventory is being compiled and maintained by the IUCN at the International Monitoring Center in Switzerland. These agreements have had some striking successes in preventing conversions in Italy, the Wadden Sea, and Pakistan, but equally they have limitations and are only as good as the compliance of the countries that sign-up to them, which currently is about only half the countries of the world.

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