BY MUSSA MUHAMMED
Wetland areas around the earth needs a radical change in the way many people recognize them before they evolve into wastelands.
“There is a need for a radical change in the way many people recognize wetlands around there as wastelands” says Julie Mulonga, Wetlands International Eastern Africa Country Director.
She noted that East Africans must do in integrating into the restoration of wetlands. The action needs collective and collaborative work to ensure sustainable wetlands management. As wetlands and the lives in them are endangered, when they turn wetlands into wastelands.
Due to the wetland’s key role in the landscapes and human lives, there is a big need for radical change in the way many recognize them as wastelands.
Wetlands everywhere need collective, transformative action to protect, and restore the one planet that bears the heaviest burden of human mismanagement and the abuse of the environment over time day and night.
It urges us to focus on living sustainably in harmony with nature. And for a good reason to refine the wetlands found in nature with their great role for lives.
According to the UN report 2022, human beings are using the equivalent of 1.6 piles of earth to maintain human current lifestyles, and the ecosystems cannot sustain human demands as human mismanagement continues as usual.
Wetlands are the kidneys of the world’s life. The day today’s interaction of human action with wetland is placing biodiversity, and human lives at risk on earth as Julie noted.
Wetlands could purify water, capture floodwaters, and during drought periods slowly release this water. But knowing why critical ecosystems like wetlands are important for all humans around the globe.
In the seaside areas, mangrove wetlands keep the devastating sea at bay and protect villages, and towns in areas such as Tana Delta, and Lamu from storms, and disasters.
Wetlands can reduce the harshness of climate change impacts, with mangroves absorbing three to five times more carbon released than terrestrial forests.
Wetland areas such as rivers, and lakes in the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Nile River Basin, and mangrove ecosystems along Africa’s East Coast are home to unique biodiversity.
They sustain millions of people by providing water, and essentials like fish and shelter materials while also supporting the livelihoods of humans.
Several steps must be taken for sustainable wetland management. Better data and knowledge need to be readily available to inform policies, plans and practices.
Humans must invest in not only generating scientific knowledge but also connecting it to indigenous knowledge. This would help both in understanding the value of wetlands, and decision-making on policymaking as well as their management for sustaining them and using them in sustainability
Two, human beings also need to enhance the capacities of stakeholders at local, national, and regional levels. This could be by strengthening institutions, training, and experimental exchanges. This would help communities, government institutions, and civil society organizations to monitor wetlands and their values, in the development of integrated conservation strategies, and sustainable uses of it.
For despoiled wetlands, restoration is the key action. Watershed management practices that include protecting the surrounding catchments against all forms of deterioration should be considered. This also means multiple users, and stakeholders must work together to reconcile objectives, and identify trade-offs and synergies for sustainable wetlands management as she mentioned.
Essentially, to address the issues affecting different wetlands such as those in the Rift Valley Lakes, there is a need to also look at what is happening in the entire landscape as far available as it inclines.
Dubbed ‘source to sea’ takes into account both freshwater, and seawater ecosystems and more holistic natural resources management is another approach for wetlands conservation.
As to her, when restoring wetlands, no one should be left behind, particularly resident communities as they have been the guardians for centuries. This would mean promoting sustainable livelihood activities that reduce negative impacts on wetlands that are found around human activities performed day today. Each human being should be active to restore, protect, conserve, and sustain it.
Alebachew Adem, the Director of wetlands international Ethiopia said that human beings need to create an enabling environment for wetlands. This helps to use sustainability and management. In Africa, only Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have wetland policies in place.
However, humans must not let them gather dust but ensure that human beings implement them and have better monitoring mechanisms for these ecosystems, to help their long-term sustenance for the present and the next generation, he noted.
Alebachew further says, the sustainable use of wetlands should be a source to sea enabling action plan.
Today in Ethiopia and Eastern Africa there is an urgency to simulate inclusive decisions in making sustainable water, and natural resource management. And to develop joint, viable solutions that will safeguard biodiversity over the region.
In addition to this Alebachew said that, the lives and livelihoods of the communities are dependent on those wetlands.
Despite these fundamental benefits, the region’s inland, and coastal wetlands are under critical threat.
Loss of wetlands for one country and region is mainly caused by over-exploration of natural resources with little regard for sustainable wise use through intensive agricultural, wood harvesting, overgrazing, in floodplains, and boiling threatened spices, he added.
The main drivers of this pressure are population, erosion, invasion of alien species, and climate change. These could be threatened by human day-to-day action. Therefore protection works should be carried out in a concerted manner.
Ayele Kebede the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) project manager said that the agency is the part of the action that leads to protection, and restoration, by allocating resources and knowledge to make a difference for the people in Africa. According to Ayele, each organization should play its part in budget and mobilization works.
His office had to play it in supporting wetland projects to restoration work, protection action plans to enable the resources to sea, and so on. He noted that the SIDA organization could not hesitate to support such nice action for restoring wetlands that help to harmonize human beings in the region as well as around the globe.
According to Ayele, saving Ethiopia and the regional wetlands needs collective, cooperative, integrated works at the entire and national levels. Each organization, every community, should need to work day in night out in joint to save it before it changes to wastelands he noted.
Julie Mulonga
The Ethiopian Herald June 26/2022
