World Wetlands day falls today, Candlemas – 2 February. A day marked in Mediaeval weather-lore ‘If Candlemas Day be fair and clear, there’ll be five winters in the year’. Let’s hope not!
February fill-dyke, the month of snow-melt, is an appropriate time to celebrate wetlands – but the reason for the date has nothing to do with our ancestors marking the passage of time. Today is the anniversary of the signing, in 1971, of the Convention on Wetlands in the Iranian town of Ramsar on the coast of the Caspian sea.
Known, for short, as the Ramsar Convention it has led to nearly four decades of having to say ‘Ramsar isn’t an acronym it’s a town in Iran’. But more seriously, the signing of this convention was a critical moment in the history of nature conservation. The convention’s mission is: ‘the conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local and national actions and international cooperation, as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development throughout the world’ and you can find out more about it here.
The theme for World Wetlands Day 2010 is ‘Caring for Wetlands: An Answer to Climate Change’. World Wetlands Day falls between the international junkets of Copenhagen last year, where the focus was tackling the climate crisis, and Nagoya in Japan in October 2010 where Governments will gather to tackle the biodiversity crisis. A good time, then, to highlight the critical role of wetlands in both agendas.
The cornerstone of the Ramsar Convention is the list of wetlands of International Importance. The designation of these special wetlands is a significant and powerful mechanism for their protection both for their intrinsic value and as functioning ecosystems that can support sustainable human use.
The RSPB is supporting our BirdLife International Partners in East Africa who are facing daunting threats to some of the most iconic wetlands in the world.
Let’s start at Tanzania’s Lake Natron
For the last three years our BirdLife International Partner in Tanzania, the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania (WCST), has been battling to protect Lake Natron which is where half a million pairs of lesser flamingo (pictured - image by James Warwick) nest. The threat comes from proposals to extract soda ash from the lake, which we believe could lead to severe impacts on the flamingos. To underline the vital role this Ramsar-designated wetland plays – it supports three quarters of the world’s population of lesser flamingos.
The Ramsar Convention sent a Mission to Tanzania in 2008 to advise the government on the long-term management of the Lake – this was prompted by the soda ash threat. Based on the Mission’s advice, in May 2008 the Tanzanian Environment Minister announced that an Integrated Management Plan for Lake Natron Basin Ramsar site would be developed before any developments were allowed to proceed, and the developer withdrew its original proposal.
This demonstrates very clearly the role of Ramsar in caring for internationally important wetlands. And one of my colleagues, Sarah Sanders – RSPB’s Global Country Programmes Manager – is near Lake Natron today! Highlighting the importance of the site, the wildlife division of the Tanzanian Government are hosting a meeting to develop an Action Plan for the Conservation of the lesser flamingo.
Thirty representatives from Government and Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have gathered including Lota Melamari, Director of WCST. He is hoping the meeting will ‘establish national priorities and synchronise conservation actions so that the future of Lake Natron is secured. Long live the flamingos of Natron!’
In Kenya, they have been building up activities across the country for the past week, which will culminate with the Minister of Environment visiting Lake Naivasha, the focus of this year’s World Wetland Day - and you can find out more on NatureKenya's website.
Naivasha – a Maasai word meaning rough water, describing the sudden storms that break over the lake. Renowned for its birds and an icon of wildlife film makers, it is a wetland in crisis.
Kenya’s Lake Naivasha is already listed as a Ramsar site but needs help if it is to have a future. Right now, the site has little hope as the human demand (including industrial flower growers) is taking out more water than nature can put in and excessive nutrients are polluting the water.
Urgent action is needed to encourage stakeholders to conserve the lake, which is in the best interests of horticulture and tourism as well as nature conservation. Sarah Sanders attended a meeting last weekend organised by a consortium of European supermarkets to discuss sustainable flower production. Her view? ‘Most growers at Naivasha want to do the right thing - we in the UK could really help by asking supermarkets where flowers come from and if environmental standards are met’.
Kenya’s Tana River Delta
The Tana River Delta is one of the most important wetlands in Africa. It’s a vital refuge for over 350 species of birds, including 22 wetland birds found in internationally important numbers; Globally Threatened birds such as the Endangered Basra reed warbler, for which the delta is a critical wintering site; and two threatened primates found nowhere else in the world – Tana red colobus and Tana River mangabey.
The heart of the Delta area covers 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres) and is a rich mix of habitats supporting not only thousands of wetland birds, but also hippos, lions, elephants, buffaloes crocodiles, rare amphibians and breeding fish and other marine life.
Longstanding environmental degradation and poor strategic management seriously threaten the Tana River Delta. More recently, interest in pursuing large-scale irrigated agriculture has increased with a number of schemes coming forward. Only last week a new 50,000 hectare project to farm oil crops including sunflower and castor on an industrial scale was proposed.
The Delta qualifies for listing as a Ramsar site, but it has not yet been designated. The Kenyan Wildlife Service has started the process for its listing. Ramsar listing is anxiously awaited, and meanwhile the threat is from biofuels, which will displace traditional food production and natural ecosystems.
My colleague Helen Byron, who works with our international partners to help them protect important sites from inappropriate developments, is frustrated by the delay. ‘Listing the Tana River Delta as a Ramsar site isn’t just a paper exercise, it would open the way for production of a long-term plan for its wise use which builds on the rich biodiversity and life supporting systems of the Delta to provide sustainable livelihoods for the thousands of local people’. Current farming, herding and fishing practices are based on local knowledge, such as using the bore of the rising tide to irrigate rice on small farms and it will be vital that the development of a long-term plan involves local people and draws on this rich knowledge.
Back home in the UK, there are 168 Ramsar sites covering 1,274,323. They don’t get a great deal of profile as here, and across the rest of the European Union (EU), as the designation of Special Protection Areas (SPAs) and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) takes precedence in policy making and site protection. Together they make up the Natura 2000 series of the best sites for wildlife across the EU and form the centrepiece of the EU’s nature policy.
Soon we will see the publication of the latest set of annual Wetland Bird Survey results and that will be a good chance to focus on some of the wonderful world-class wetlands in our own backyard.
I’m just back from a briefing we organised in London. The audience got to hear the details behind this story. We’ve had a bit of a blog-fest on this topic today so you can read more by visiting Mark Avery’s blog and our News blog.
The pursuit of tidal power by the construction of massive barrages has occupied a lot of work by the RSPB over the last 30 years – for four years I was deeply involved in the process of scrutinising the potential for a Mersey barrage in the early 1990s. Today we learned a lot about the potential environmental impacts and massive ongoing costs generated by building a storm surge barrier across the Oosterscheldte in Holland (and here’s a map to show you it’s location).
The Dutch had few options given the hard-learned lessons of the devastating coastal floods of 1953. As a storm surge barrier – it has been successful but at a cost. A cost that is being measured in coastal erosion, increased flood risk (though not from storms) and environmental damage. The barrier has created a sand hunger as the river and it’s estuary fight to achieve a new equilibrium.
And this is the lesson for the UK – this will be the consequence of barraging the Severn (and beyond that the Mersey, Solway, Wash and Thames) - the ravenous sand hunger will be the same. These are impacts and costs we can avoid – we have the choice.
The search for sustainable tidal energy has been deeply skewed by the focus on the big-kit barrages that are at the most devastating end of the spectrum of impacts on our natural environment. The lessons from the Dutch experience have been known to Government for a couple of years – and we urge the Government to publish the critically important, and delayed, studies into the impact on the tides and sediments of the Severn barrage.
We’ve said before that proper strategic planning, with good community consultation and environmental assessment, is essential to steer development away from environmentally-damaging options.
That’s why the RSPB and WWF-UK commissioned a report on the Government’s assessments of the draft national policy statements (NPSs) for energy and ports infrastructure. Here’s another three-letter acronym – AoS, for appraisal of sustainability. The Government commissioned consultants to carry out appraisals of the sustainability of all their NPSs. We asked Collingwood Environmental Planning, experts in this type of assessment, to scrutinise them.
You can see the full report and our briefing here, and what Planning magazine said here.
As one MP on the climate change committee noted, the report is pretty scathing of the AoSs. It seems to us that they fall short of the requirements in European law. We’re not the only people to be concerned; Friends of the Earth have picked up the same points and have written in detail to the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
So what’s the actual problem? Isn’t this just legal nit-picking?
In short, the key issue is whether the planners have properly considered reasonable alternatives before deciding on the content of the NPS, and therefore whether environmentally-good options have been chosen. For the energy NPSs, this might lead you to ask questions like “What’s the best energy mix for the environment?” or “Is it better to have a plan that steers development to the best places, or one which leaves it to the market?” That second question could apply equally to ports as well.
In fact, the appraisals of the energy NPSs simply ask “Should we have a plan or not?” (or a couple of variations with different levels of detail).
To our way of thinking, that’s a silly question. Parliament has decided there should be a plan – and everyone agreed it was a good idea. What we really want to know is the environmental effects of the things we are planning for – energy infrastructure and ports. Of course, there will be detailed environmental assessments when specific projects are being planned, but now is the time to think strategically to stop environmentally-damaging projects coming forward in the first place.
It's likely that the Government won't make a final decisions on their statements until after the General Election, maybe not until the autumn. We'd like them to start again and do the job properly, and we're prepared to give what help we can to do that.
I regularly bang on about how important our protected areas are. In particular, our Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation (together forming the European Natura 2000 network) are vital to efforts to safeguarded not just wildlife but also a range of services the natural world provides directly to us. The jargon phrase ‘ecosystems services’ sounds like it should be on the side of a white van – but covers all that water gathering, soil forming, flood protecting, life enhancing stuff that our countryside gives us before you even start counting the birds (but you can do that too).
Well – here’s a an interesting report from the European Environment Agency that packs a lot of details into a short document describing the protected areas of Europe. It’s one of a series they are producing during the course of this International Year of Biodiversity.
Is it a good idea to have a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham? Simple question – so what’s the answer? It should be yes shouldn’t it?
Along with many others – in particular the communities along the, as yet, undefined route – we await the publication of the Department for Transport’s report into High Speed 2 (HS2) which will bring much needed clarity. This report is expected towards the end of next month.
Here’s the check-list we will be applying to the report when it arrives on our desks:
In our experience, there is a world of difference between wanting to support a good idea and taking a position on an actual proposal. We won’t know our position until the report is out and we’ve had a chance to look at the detail.
You may be wondering why this proposal is HS2 – HS1 was formally known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. I can recall the creeping dereliction that was caused by the endless uncertainty over the route into Ashford. The stakes are massively high to get this right – if you live between London and Birmingham, let me know what you think.