On the occasion of World Wetlands Day, the event “Water, wetlands and life” was presented by the vice-president and minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera. A scientific debate on the importance and benefits of wetlands, as well as the need for their conservation and restoration, in which the managing director of the Global Nature Foundation, Eduardo de Migue, the professor of ecology at the University of Valencia, Antonio Camacho, and the director of the Biodiversity Foundation of MITECO, Elena Pita, shared the table.
A key scenario, where the Life Wetlands4Climate project stood out for its objective of highlighting the role of wetlands as carbon sinks and investigating their potential to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Eduardo de Miguel stressed that there are clear challenges that we must face in order to conserve our wetlands: to stop the degradation of wetlands, to work on their cataloguing and to make progress in their restoration. Antonio Camacho focused on the relationship between wetlands and climate change. “Healthy ecosystems, especially wetlands, which have a great transfer of matter and energy, can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change and even reverse this effect,” he said.
The government’s commitment, presented by Teresa Ribera, is to achieve the recovery of 20,000 hectares of wetlands by 2030, complementing the 18,000 hectares already restored in recent decades. This objective is in line with European biodiversity policies and the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, which specifies the obligation of European countries to improve by at least 30% the habitats and species in the worst state of conservation, including wetlands.
You can watch the full event below:
