The Wuhan Declaration was adopted on November 7 at the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (COP14).
- The COP14 is being held in China’s Wuhan and Switzerland’s Geneva.
About Wuhan Declaration
- The declaration called for “strong will and practical actions” to promote the conservation, restoration, management, wise and sustainable use of wetlands and to prevent and mitigate the systematic risks arising from the continuing loss and degradation of wetlands worldwide.
- Despite numerous conservation efforts, the world’s natural wetlands have declined by 35 percent since the Ramsar Convention entered into force about five decades ago, according to the COP14.
- Calls made by the declaration include supporting wetlands-related legislation, undertaking the assessment and accounting of wetlands resources, conserving, restoring and sustainably managing wetlands in urban and suburban areas, and strengthening global technical cooperation and knowledge sharing.
About Ramsar Convention
- India is one of the Contracting Parties to Ramsar Convention, signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971.
- Wetlands are extremely important for a healthy biodiversity in the country, where forests act like lungs and wetlands work like kidneys to clean the environment.
- The wetlands essentially act as the ‘kidneys of the landscape’, filtering and capturing sediment, and helping settle it to the bed of the wetland and the plants use these nutrients to grow which supports the whole ecosystem.
- Being designated a Ramsar site does not necessarily invite extra international funds.
- States and the Centre must ensure that these tracts of land are conserved and spared from encroachment.
- Acquiring this label also helps with a locale’s tourism potential and its international visibility.
- To be Ramsar site, however, it must meet at least one of nine criteria as defined by the Ramsar Convention of 1971, such as supporting vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered species or threatened ecological communities or, if it regularly supports 20,000 or more waterbirds or, is an important source of food for fishes, spawning ground, nursery and/or migration path on which fish stocks are dependent upon.
- There are 75 designated Ramsar sites in India which cover an area of 13,26,677 ha.
