Conservation Efforts for Wetlands
Conservation efforts are the different ways conservation problems are addressed and solved. Human activities like development, urbanization, and other live convenience invention have a bad way of affecting the environment. The environment is the total surrounding affecting living and non living things. In biological terms it is called the ecosystem. So the world is wide ecosystem consisting of smaller ecosystem like: wetland. Wetland is an area of land that is temporarily or permanently filled with soil and moisture. Examples are mangroves, cattails, sedges, marshes, and swamps which are found in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These countries are homes to the largest types of wetlands.
Why conservation efforts for wetlands?
It is an established fact that man is the reason behind every conservation or environmental problems, and ironically humans are also the brain behind conservation efforts. Through conscious and unconscious efforts humankind have reduced the environment to a dangerous one, efforts such as invention, discoveries, urbanization, etc., resulting to deforestation, green house effects, desertification, acidic rain, and endangering species are some of the ways man have created an in-equilibrium in the environment thus leading to conservation efforts. Now the question – why wetland conservation effort?
Wetland biologically vary among all ecosystem, many plants live in the ecosystem, namely mangrove, water lilies, sedges, tamarack, black spruce, etc, and different animals like amphibians, fishes, mammals, insects, and reptiles. Also are the non living things like the sun, soil, sand, topography, etc., all having one interacting features that enables relationship with one another and adaptive features, enabling them to exist in the environment. Due to human disturbances these inter-relationship and coexistence are threatened.
Poaching which is the killing of living things in their natural habit by humans is one of the major reasons why some species are endangered. Another example of human destructive efforts in wetland is in drainage efforts, real estate development, flooding for creating recreational lakes, etc. These off-courses disturb the natural food chain causing conditions like famine, scarcity, and cannibalism. This in-equilibrium leads to conservation efforts for wetland.
Conservation efforts for wetlands
In other to curb this evil effect of human destruction on wetland some conservation effort are in place. Ramsar convention is an international treaty designed to address world issues regarding the gradual loss and dilapidation of wetlands. It is aimed at promoting the important use of some of the major international wetlands, in view of preserving the wetlands.
Country conservation
This conservation outreach is targeted towards individual countries having their own wetlands they are:
New Zealand
The focus is on New Zealand considering the fact that more than 90% of their wetlands have been destroyed by European settlers, the protection is under the resource management act.
South Africa
Another country is South Africa. This effort is a dual one between the department of environmental affairs and tourism in South Africa and the departments of water affairs, forestry, and agriculture. They offer support through encouraging rehabilitating, and sustaining the wetlands in South Africa by providing relief efforts like poverty and employment relief.
Other countries involve in conservation relieves are Sweden, United states, Paraguay, and many others.