Planners need to allow for Coastal wetlands migration due to sea level rise, climate change

Indymedia.org (Australia): Coastal Wetlands are under pressure. They face rising seas from climate change, but their biggest obstacle to migrate naturally inland is human development with roads, houses and other infrastructure blocking their way. And our urban planners are largely unaware of this tricky situation.

We all love to live beside the sea, but coastal urban development and rising seas will increasingly threaten sensitive coastal wetlands with no room to move and imperilling the survival of their unique plants, birds and fish.

Our urban planners have taken a stable sea level for granted with development to date, often destroying wetland environments for coastal development, agriculture and aquaculture.

More recent urban planning incorporating sea level rise predictions places an emphasis on the threat to peoples houses, roads, railway embankments and other human infrastructure. But planning also needs to encompass the coastal wetland environments that share our coastlines. These ecosystems will also need to migrate inland as the ocean rises....

Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia, from NASA

Messing with natural habitats only makes flooding worse

Tony Juniper in the Independent (UK): Recent flooding has caused widespread misery, disruption and large-scale economic damage. One sector that has been hard hit is insurance. Because flooding is becoming more frequent due to climate change, some areas are becoming uninsurable. Some 200,000 properties could soon see withdrawal of flood insurance and talks between government and the Association of British Insurers are yet to reach agreement on how insurance cover might be continued for those properties at highest risk.

Alongside debates on how to maintain insurance cover, another natural focus in the wake of deluges of the kind recently experienced is about the quality and extent of traditional flood defences. All this is fine, but for me there is a piece missing. It relates to both these questions and is about the vital role that could be played by so-called ‘green infrastructure’.

While the risk of flooding can be reduced at least in the short-term through the building of hard defences (such as higher levies and bigger storm drains), approaches that go more with the flow of nature can be both cheaper and more effective. For example, peat bogs on hills store rainwater and release it slowly into streams and rivers. When the bogs are damaged, heavy rain runs off more quickly and can cause problems below.

...With these and many other experiences in mind, various bodies including conservation groups, water companies and local authorities are beginning to invest in trees and peatland restoration as cost-effective measures to reduce flood risk (and improve water quality). Peat and trees also contain a lot of carbon, so this way of cutting flood risk is also a way to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air....

Damage from the 2007 flood in Sheffield, UK, shot by Dave Pickersgill, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Greenhouse gas emissions from drained wetlands equal to industrial sources

Red Orbit: Greenhouse gas emissions originating from drained wetlands are roughly equal to that given off by industrial factories, a team of Swedish researchers claim in a new study. Experts from the University of Gothenburg and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) were commissioned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency to analyze and compile a report about the amount of greenhouse gases given off by forests and agricultural fields on areas that once had been wetlands.

They discovered those forests and fields, which comprise as much as 10-percent of the country’s total surface area, become a “significant source of greenhouse emissions” once the wetlands have been drained, the university said in a statement released Friday.

“We note that drained wetlands which have been forested or used for agricultural purposes are a significant potential source of greenhouse gases of a magnitude that is at least comparable with the industrial sector’s greenhouse gas emissions in Sweden,” they said.

...“As long as wetlands remain wet, only methane is given off,” Dr. Kasimir Klemedtsson of the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Earth Sciences, said. “However, for more than a hundred years land has been drained for agriculture and forestry, producing large quantities both carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.”...

A wetlands in Dalarna, Sweden, shot by Stefan Grünig, Privatarchiv, Wikiimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Tana River Delta a Wetland of International Importance - Kenya

Tana River Delta via www.ramsar.org

The Tana River Delta in Kenya, which includes part of Lamu County, has been officially designated as a Wetland of International Importance by the Kenyan government. According to the Secretariat of the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, the Delta covers 163,600 hectares, is an Important Bird Area in Coast Province, and is the “second most important estuarine and deltaic ecosystem in Eastern Africa.” The delta comprises a variety of freshwater, floodplain, estuarine and coastal habitats with extensive and diverse mangrove systems, marine brackish and freshwater intertidal areas, pristine beaches and shallow marine areas, forming productive and functionally interconnected ecosystems. Kenya presently has six Ramsar Sites, covering an area of 265,449 hectares.

Read more about the Tana River Delta's new designation here. Learn more about the Ramsar Convention here.