Along Asian coastlines, there are many areas where rural communities are experiencing alarming rates of sea-level rise due to the loss of their mangrove cover. Europe also has lost half of its wetlands, much of it through drainage.
Last year, the Andalusian parliament legalized the widespread abstraction of underground water by strawberry farmers, which is drying up the Doñana wetland and leading to the desertification of Spain.
Degradation of Sahelian wetlands in north-central Africa has caused resource scarcity, undermining human well-being and compelling people to migrate.
In Indonesia, peat swamps are rapidly being logged, burned, and converted for agriculture, causing massive forest fires affecting the respiratory health of millions of people.
Meanwhile, as you read this, the world’s largest tropical wetland ecosystem, the Pantanal of Brazil, is being scorched by wildfires.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with an annual UN climate conference, COP28, which is focused on emissions reduction and coping with the impacts of a globally heating world?
Well, everything.
Mitigation
Mitigation refers to reducing the amount of greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere to slow the rate of climate change. The most important action needed in this aspect is rapid and ambitious emission reduction.
The UN Environment Program’s Emissions Gap Report tracks the gap between where global emissions are heading with current country commitments and where they ought to be to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The 2023 report shows that progress has been made since 2015 but much deeper emissions cuts need to be made this decade to limit global warming.
Research has shown that nature-based solutions can provide more than one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed to stabilize warming to below 2 degrees by 2030. Alongside aggressive-fossil fuel emissions reductions, nature-based solutions offer a powerful set of options for nations to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement.
Wetland ecosystems like mangroves, marshes, peatlands and seagrass beds absorb and store carbon. They are essential parts of Earth’s natural carbon cycle and crucial to mitigating climate change.
Last year’s State of the World’s Mangroves report estimated that mangroves sequester carbon at up to four times the rate of terrestrial forests.
Peatlands are some of the most misunderstood habitats on our planet. Viewed for decades as wastelands, peatlands – though only covering about 3% of our planet’s land – store about twice the amount of carbon as all the world’s forests combined.
While mitigating climate change is essential, adapting to it is an equally urgent matter, and wetlands have some solutions.
Adaptation
The effects of climate change are already being felt. The five warmest years on record in Europe have all occurred since 2014, leading to multiple heatwaves. Floods and landslides from extreme rain took hundreds of lives across Asia this year.
We can only expect the frequency and intensity of disasters caused by climate change to increase especially as new UNEP analysis shows insufficient progress made by countries. And unfortunately, the hardest hit are those who contributed least to its cause.
Wetlands can curb some of these effects. The sturdy roots of mangrove forests and leaves of seagrass meadows protect shorelines from storm surges and sea level rise by preventing erosion and softening the force of waves. Peatlands act as sponges, slowly holding and releasing water, reducing the intensity of both floods and droughts.
Conversely, the loss and degradation of wetlands exacerbates the climate crisis by releasing greenhouse gases and leaving ecosystems, and the people dependent on them, more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The draining of peatlands alone releases the equivalent of about 4% of all annual emissions caused by human activity.
To enable global warming to remain below 1.5 degrees, at least half of drained peatlands should be restored by 2030, and further peatland loss should be prevented.
Despite ample evidence in support of nature-based solutions, the amount of public international funding flowing to them for adaptation accounted for less than 1.5% of total climate finance flows in 2018, and public multilateral and bilateral adaptation finance flows to developing countries declined by 15% in 2021.
But the news is not all bad. Recent analysis shows a growing inclusion of coastal and marine ecosystems in climate strategies. For instance, Belize plans to protect and restore mangrove and seagrass ecosystems to enhance their carbon sequestration capacity, while Liberia has committed to fully integrating mangrove emissions and absorption into the national greenhouse gas-inventory by 2030.
Healthy wetlands are a powerful solution to the climate crisis. What we need now is urgent action. Governments, business, and civil society must collaborate to scale up the safeguarding and restoration of wetland ecosystems, as well as tackle the drivers that destroy wetlands.
Commitments and efforts under the Convention on Wetlands can be leveraged to deliver climate action but finance needs to be made available to support wetland projects. With the conclusion of the first Global Stocktake, COP28 should be the time countries rapidly include ambitious wetland actions in their Nationally Determined Contributions.