As we celebrate the World Wetland Day on February 2, the theme for the year 2025 “Protecting Wetlands for Common Future” seems so appropriate and pertinent. Water is the basic requirement of every living organism that can photosynthesize, synthesize its food, and form the basis of the food chain for all ecosystems. Every drop that is received on the earth's surface, through the hydrological cycle, needs to be preserved and all the existing resources conserved. Wetlands are specialized ecosystems, as described in the International Convention on Wetlands, deserve special attention. The theme also aligns fully with the Sustainable Development Goals and that of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, reinforcing the importance of wetland conservation in achieving sustainable development. Wetlands all across the globe serve as nature's best havens for water conservation and biodiversity protection.
The wetlands are highly diverse ecosystems and most often misinterpreted. Many people consider only the lakes, bogs, ponds and swamps as wetlands, however as per the definition of wetlands that has been accepted universally wetlands include estuarine areas, coral leafs, river catchment ecotones, oases in arid semi-arid ecosystems, and many other naturally created depressions on land surface that are filled round the year with water or have water available in them in a particular season of the year. Alpine meadow wetlands, the lakes and ponds created by river distributaries, and the salt pans are also categorized as wetland ecosystems. Humans understood that water is very important for their survival and domestication of crops and cattle, and therefore they settled on river banks or near the water bodies. Humans by their ingenuity also created many artificial wetlands in the form of water reservoirs, dams, rainwater harvesting units, and a plenty of artificial water bodies for aquaculture where they reared fish, shrimps and cultivated aquatic plants with immense food and other economic uses. The connection of Humans with wetlands is so intricate that human existence stands threatened if we lose the wetlands at the rate we are losing them.
Wetlands need to be protected to secure the future of the younger generation as their existence is important for the survival of mankind. If we turn the pages of history, we get the glimpses of the Human-Wetland relationship; the paintings in museums, the ancient texts, the poems, the relics and the scientific studies all corroborate this. The question arises: if Humans understood the importance of wetlands through ages, why did they not care enough? This is probably because the early understanding of wetland ecology was shallow. As the Humans evolved and population increased, humans became a little ruthless towards nature and thought these are ecosystems that will always be there, serve us by providing enormous ecological services, providing habitats for birds and insects, providing food from foliage, flowers and fruits of aquatic plants and also making the area cool till eternity. We thought despite the onslaught and overload of waste that goes into them, these wetlands will stay resilient forever. For a long time, these wetlands also acted like sinks as they absorbed waste because of the fast decomposition of solid waste by aquatic microflora and fauna. Gradually, when man learned to domesticate crops, and when the need to cultivate more food to meet the growing human population increased, he silted these wetlands to grow cash crops on those and wetlands started disappearing. And as the need for infrastructure increased, the real estate mafia took over small wetlands all across the country and constructed huge buildings on them. The ecologists, though few in number, tried to raise concerns over the loss of wetlands in urban and peri-urban areas. They also discussed the declining bird populations and their relationships with vanishing wetlands. But, people turned deaf ear. The time was to bring in Economists in their discussions as Humans started valuing money. Ecological evaluation of wetlands by putting economic value of wetland ecosystem services, like flood control and water purification, which often is not fully recognized or factored, was seriously taken up. Ecological economists then were able to bring a paradigm shift in the way wetlands are perceived and wetlands started gaining recognition for their various uses such as serving as habitats unique aquatic biodiversity, water recharging zones acting as buffer zones to reduce floods, in the various ecosystems. This again served as an impetus to unravel the connections between human survival and wetland survival, and thus the theme protect the wetlands to protect the future!
Who is going to do play a pivotal role in wetland conservation? Government, policy makers, non-government organizations or communities. It is our moral duty to protect the future of our children in all possible ways and ecological security is a priority area. For this, our generation has to raise a generation who is well informed, generation that is appropriately skilled, a generation that is open to look back and learn from the traditional methods, ancient ways by which humans protected the natural resources and a generation that can use disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and churn things and select the best ways to protect the wetlands. For ecosystems that are dynamic, we cannot have one tailor-made strategy that can be applied in conservation of wetlands all across. For this understanding basic sciences such as geography, geology, limnology, ecology, sociology, history and anthropology is important and the subjects should be taught in schools and colleges. Wetland conservation cannot be done if all the stakeholders that have connections to the wetland are not on board. Strategy, that is steered and led by youngsters, will definitely bring dividends. So today on 2nd February, 2025, let the young generation steer the conservation as the future is theirs and wetlands are a cultural heritage they need to preserve to secure their future generations too. Together as informed civil society, a country that has adopted Mission LIFE and a country that sees itself developed by 2047, let us protect all the wetlands around us. Every effort is going to make an impact.

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