Eurasian spoonbills and lack-tailed godwits at a wetland. Photo: Santanu Sen/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- India has the highest number of, and area under, Ramsar wetlands in South Asia. On World Wetland Day, February 2, the environment ministry added two more.
- While designating a wetland as a Ramsar site may bring it more public attention, the threats that some sites face continue unabated.
- According to the latest wetland atlas, India’s wetland area has increased by 0.64 million hectares since 2007 – but this increase has mostly been in human-made wetlands.
Kochi: To mark World Wetland Day on February 2, the environment ministry designated two new ‘Ramsar’ wetlands in India. This gives these wetlands international recognition and more conservation significance.
Environment minister Bhupender Yadav also released a ‘wetland atlas’ according to which India’s overall wetland area increased by 0.64 million hectares (Mha) over the last decade.
However, around 1,340 wetlands have ‘disappeared’ between 2007 and 2018, according to the ‘atlas’. Natural wetlands saw losses in area while man-made ones increased. What do these changes mean, and does designating a wetland as a Ramsar site really help conserve it?
Wetlands and the Ramsar Convention
Wetlands are areas filled with static or flowing water. These could be natural or man-made, and include marshes, fens and peatlands. They could also be inland and coastal. Lakes and ponds, estuaries, swamps, marshes, floodplains of rivers and even man-made water bodies – such as reservoirs that are created when rivers are dammed – qualify as wetlands according to the Wetlands Division under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
As per the Division, India is home to more than 7.5 lakh wetlands.
The many ecosystem functions that wetlands provide to both people and biodiversity make it important to conserve them. These include flood control (such as this study by scientists at the Indian Institute of Science shows) and livelihood support for numerous communities including fishers.
Wetlands also support a wide range of biodiversity, from small mammals such as the endangered fishing cat, to migratory birds and invertebrates. They serve as crucial carbon sinks too in the fight against climate change: wetlands have some of the highest soil carbon densities compared to other natural ecosystems.
The Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental treaty that India ratified in 1981, aims to provide a framework for national action and international partnership to conserve and use wetlands and their resources sustainably. As per the Convention, signatory countries can declare specific wetlands as ‘Ramsar sites’, if they meet one or more of nine criteria (such as if it regularly supports 20,000 or more waterbirds).
Designating a wetland as a Ramsar site marks it as a wetland of both national and international significance.
India’s new Ramsar sites
One of the two new Ramsar wetlands in India is the Bakhira Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh, which serves as a wintering ground for a large number of species, according to a government press release. It is part of the Central Asian Flyway, a route that covers a large area of Eurasia – between the Arctic and Indian oceans – which large numbers of migratory birds regularly use.
The other is the Khijadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Gujarat, a coastal wetland with rich avifaunal diversity, which is home to several endangered and vulnerable species.
This brings India’s Ramsar site tally to 49. It also increases the area under Ramsar sites to 10,93,636 hectares. This is the highest in south Asia.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted the news, calling it ‘excellent’. “Excellent news! India having the largest network of Ramsar Sites in South Asia manifests the commitment of our citizens to protect flora and fauna and live in harmony with nature,” he tweeted.
Excellent news!
India having the largest network of Ramsar Sites in South Asia manifests the commitment of our citizens to protect flora and fauna and live in harmony with nature. https://t.co/ux7B2pvUtF
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 3, 2022
This, however, is not a new feat, even if press releases and media coverage further that impression. India achieved that status in August last year itself when it designated four new Ramsar sites, as Ritesh Kumar, Director of Wetlands International South Asia and a member of the Ramsar Convention’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel, wrote in Mongabay-India.
It is also not a surprising feat. India, after all, has the largest land area among the eight south Asian countries. It is home to 7,57,000 wetlands with a total wetland area of 15.3 million ha, accounting for nearly 4.7% of the total geographical area of the country, as The Wire reported.
Indeed, India has been on a Ramsar site declaration spree over the last decade. Almost half of all of the country’s Ramsar sites have been declared after 2010. But how does designating a wetland as a Ramsar site help conserve it?
Benefits of being a Ramsar site
First, each Ramsar site requires the development of a management plan. In India, 25 Ramsar sites have management plans ready and 18 have implemented these plans, said Pronoy Baidya, Asian Waterbird Census state Coordinator of the Goa Bird Conservation Network. These management plans can serve as a roadmap for the ‘wise use’ of the wetland, as the Ramsar Convention specifies. This wise use is important because they support livelihoods like fishing, agriculture, aquaculture or wildlife-based tourism, Baidya added.
According to him, the designation of Ramsar sites works together with several other conservation mechanisms to conserve wetlands in India. Under the Wetland (Conservation and Management) Rules 2017, states can identify wetlands of importance. Simultaneously, state forest departments can also designate wetlands of importance under the Central Asian Flyway Action Plan. Together, these can provide legal protection to these sites from the perspective of birds. While this is a positive start, it is not all hunky dory either.
“Implementation needs to be more strict,” said Baidya.
Designating a wetland as a Ramsar site also means that it gets more public attention, said Priya Ranganathan, a doctoral student studying wetland ecosystem services at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru.
She cited the example of Sambhar Lake in Rajasthan, designated as a Ramsar site in 1990. The Lake has had issues with garbage dumping and pollution. But a lot of funds have come in for its clean up, and this has been a consequence of its status as a Ramsar site, she said.
But being a Ramsar site does not automatically guarantee that threats will be addressed. Deepor Beel, one of the largest wetlands in the Brahmaputra valley, appears to be a case in point. Located on the outskirts of Guwahati city in Assam, the wetland serves as a crucial livelihood for the indigenous Karbi and Koibortra communities who live nearby.
Apart from supporting biodiversity including fish, invertebrates and birds (102 species), the Beel is also home to around 100 Asian elephants. Though it was declared a Ramsar site in 2002, it still faces numerous threats. It continues to be a dumping ground for garbage; human settlements have eaten into the wetland, as has the construction of a railway line.
Deepor Beel is “perishing” from concretisation and waste dumping, reported Down to Earth. And its Ramsar tag does not appear to be helping. According to Guwahati Plus, the Northeast Frontier Railway has recently sought the National Green Tribunal’s permission to resume work on double tracking the railway line passing through the northern part of Deepor Beel.
While designating a wetland as a Ramsar site is important, many of India’s wetlands would qualify as Ramsar sites because of the ecosystem services and functions they perform, said Ranganathan.
Wetland area has increased: Atlas
The status of India’s wetlands (Ramsar site or not) over the past decade is what the National Wetland Decadal Change Atlas – released by environment minister Yadav – highlights. Scientists at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad, mapped wetlands larger than 2.25 hectares in area across the country, using satellite imagery. While ground-truthing is a crucial part of such analyses that use remotely-sensed data, this is missing in the Atlas; this is apparently due to the ‘restrictions’ caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Atlas.
At first look, the results seem to suggest that India’s wetlands are doing well. According to the Atlas, the area under wetlands in India has increased by 0.64 million hectares (Mha), from 15.34 Mha in 2006-07 to 15.98 Mha in 2017-18. Wetlands have increased in number too during this time, by 18,810. State-wise, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have the highest numbers of wetlands, while Gujarat leads in terms of wetland area.
But interestingly, most of this increase is in man-made wetlands (which comprise only one-third of India’s total wetlands), not natural ones. Inland man-made wetlands have increased by around 80%, and coastal man-made ones by 17%.
That’s because any waterbody created by human action – including reservoirs and aquaculture farms – also count as wetlands. For instance, the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project will submerge around 9,000 hectares of land, 5,803 of which lie within the core area of the Panna Tiger Reserve. The reservoir that this creates will, ironically, be counted as a wetland.
New ‘blue’ cover, but at a cost
And data buried in the Atlas points to this. In both the Deccan plateau and India’s semi-arid areas, for instance, most of the new wetlands have been created under the reservoirs and barrages category, as well as under ‘tanks and ponds’. Along the coasts, aquaculture ponds have contributed hugely to the increase in the number of wetlands.
As many as 1,342 wetlands – spanning 25,289 hectares – have also disappeared between 2007 and 2018. Intertidal mudflats, a type of marsh-like coastal wetlands, have declined by 4.8%. “Majority of intertidal mudflats area [sic] converted to salt pans,” the Atlas details.
“While reservoirs are important man-made wetlands, one needs to be careful while creating them and avoid displacing families, changing the course of a river and even altering any natural wetlands that had formed as part of the river,” said Ranganathan.
And these new reservoirs need not necessarily be performing more efficient, or better, ecosystem services than the services that the natural ecosystem that was there before it did, she said. So it is crucial that we should not be creating wetlands at the expense of other natural ecosystems, she added.
“We cannot look at one land feature in isolation. It is the same as with increasing green cover – where plantations also count as green cover. They might not always meet the ecological criteria that forests meet, but they are counted as green cover. It’s the same with wetlands and ‘blue’ cover too.”