As cities grow, wetlands often disappear – and with it, their benefits for natural ecosystems and people. However, proper urban design and planning can avert wetland degradation and enhance wetlands’ overall urban protection and ecosystem benefits. This year’s World Wetlands Day, celebrated annually on 2nd February, is focused on wetlands restoration – SEI research highlights how policy that promotes urban wetlands restoration can improve urban ecology and human well-being.
Photo by: lin2015 / Pixabay
Often called “nature’s kidneys”, wetlands play a key role in balancing ecological processes, with benefits to people. Whether naturally occurring swamps and marshes, or human-made ponds and rain gardens, wetlands can act as natural wastewater management, by minimizing pollution, controlling flooding risks, and mitigating extreme urban heat island effects.
Urban wetlands can be particularly valuable for these benefits, and understanding how they function is absolutely necessary to reverse their degradation and improve urban liveability in a holistic fashion. Conserved and restored urban wetlands have the potential to reduce urban flooding while buffering storm surges, since they act as sponges, potentially shielding urban dwellers from extreme weather impacts such as flooding. In the process, these wetlands restore water quality and supply through natural filtration, by removing unwanted pollutants. In addition to acting as remarkably effective carbon sinks, wetlands provide habitat and breeding sites for approximately 40% of plants and wildlife; restoring or conserving wetlands in urban settings could help maintain biodiversity in cities and their surroundings.
Photo by: Robert Jones / Pixabay
Urban wetlands can also revive cities and increase human wellbeing. Known as “blue-green infrastructure”, wetlands and other natural features incorporated into cityscapes can improve urban dwellers’ health, through encouraging physical and recreational activities, providing outdoor relaxation spaces, and improving social life from more frequent human interactions and more access to “green spaces”, something that humans are programmed to need.
SEI’s Initiative on City Health and Wellbeing uses contemporary approaches to understand heterogenous urban form impacts on general liveability, while highlighting the health benefits of green infrastructure in developing cities. Economically, urban wetlands restoration can be a part of ecotourism, attracting visitors while generating revenue necessary for their maintenance.
Nearly five decades after its adoption, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands stays committed to promoting the sustainable use of all wetlands and minimizing their loss through national and global cooperation, as well as policy developments. In 2012, the 11th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC formulated the Resolution XI.11 principle to raise awareness and recognition of both small- and large-scale wetlands within urban planning.
Protecting and restoring urban wetlands will be a huge challenge: cities around the world are growing, particularly in low-income countries. The accompanying upsurge in demand for land puts wetlands especially at risk, as they are usually converted to built-up areas. Loss of wetlands has implications for climate impacts for growing urban centres.
Photo by: F. Muhammad / Pixabay
Policy makers, urban planners, city managers and developers stand at the core of creating climate-resilient cities, and one tool they have is integration and promotion of urban wetland restoration. Some of these practices include:
Researchers at SEI have also explored the promises and pitfalls of nature-based solutions, in which urban wetlands play a key role. More research will follow from SEI’s programmes, which are intended to bring science to policy in protecting urban wetlands and enhancing human wellbeing in cities, in a world in which cities will only continue to grow.
Initiative / This initiative investigates how rapidly growing cities affect residents' wellbeing and how this interacts with the overall health of city systems.
Project / A project to assess levels of knowledge and people's understandings of air pollution and see whether this changes over time.
SEI report / This SEI report examines issues that must be addressed to foster community-led initiatives to plan, maintain, restore and expand urban nature spaces.
Past event / At the 2024 World Urban Forum, SEI York and partners will strengthen stakeholders capacity on inclusive and climate-resilient urban transportation in Africa.
Perspective / Gary Haq in The Conversation: governments and institutions must collect more data on how climate change impacts older adults to develop inclusive policies.
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