The importance of wetlands in a changing climate

I am writing this when the Conference of Parties commonly known as COP 26 is taking place in the United Kingdom in Glasgow. Having spent a better part of 2021 in Uganda conducting field research activities on a topic very close to my heart and passion – conservation of wetlands in Wakiso district, Uganda I have come to appreciate how vital natural wetlands are. I will use the analogy of natural wetlands as human kidneys to write about something that we are all very familiar with. The human body has four major internal organs including the heart, the lungs, the liver, and the kidneys. These are known as sensitive organs and are thus protected by the skeletal system. If any of the four is not safe, it will be difficult or impossible for one to live a normal and healthy life.

Back to the kidneys, if you don’t take good care of them, they will get sick and you will be warned to stop or reduce what is causing the problem to them. If you do not listen, your kidneys will continue to get sick and one of the kidneys may be removed. You will continue surviving but in the worst-case scenario, you may need a total kidney transplant where both need to be replaced. To get a transplant you have two options: either to get a willing donor or to buy. Both options are not cheap, let alone the process of transplanting, and therefore not afforded by the majority of people. Also, the chance of success is 50/50. This is how bad the situation can be!

Relating the above to our physical world, we have four key sensitive and fragile ecosystems including lakes, rivers, wetlands and forests. These four support life on earth for fauna and flora. I will focus on the wetlands which serve as the kidneys in our bodies. Our wetlands play many key roles including absorption of carbon dioxide, collecting and storing flood and muddy water and releasing it fresh for our consumption and acting as breeding places for the fish which the majority of us do enjoy.

Sadly, our wetlands are under serious attack from encroachers and degraders. The warning signs are clear to us but we are proving to be adamant in not listening or observing the signs. Hence, slowly and steadily we are heading to the kidney transplant level. Considering the fact that Uganda is one of the fastest-growing countries population-wise, it is also a country with a fast-changing climate, resulting in many hazards including flooding, long dry-spells and food insecurities causing loss of life and property. Indeed, wetlands in the country are degraded 70 times more than they are conserved. The country loses wetlands three times more than forests yet we don’t have the capacity to afford the cost of creating artificial wetlands. Preaching adaptation and mitigation to climate alone is not the only solution as rightly observed by one of the young Ugandan climate change activists – Vanessa Nakate who noted that, “You cannot adapt to a lost culture, you cannot adapt to a lost tradition, a lost history and starvation or extinction”. It is time now for all concerned stakeholders to focus on the care of the vulnerable individuals and communities through making every effort to conserve the remaining natural wetlands, deliberately come up with a communication strategy that will send a clear message to all the citizens in a language that they understand and through a mode that is accessible to them be it televisions, radios, social media platforms, use of billboards, word of mouth as well as traditional institutions to pass on the wetland conservation and restoration message. All our educational institutions should incorporate the element of environment conservation because without it we will all be challenged to live healthy lives. It should also be our responsibility as citizens to resist and discourage all wetland degraders at all cost because their actions directly affect our lives as well as that of our children and their children.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)