Chinese researchers have pitched global targets for wetlands conservation that could inform national biodiversity strategies in a bid to address their absence.

Targets for expanding protected wetland areas globally under ‘conservative’, ‘moderate’, and ‘ambitious’ scenarios were pitched in a paper published in the Nature journal led by Qu Yi from the Heilongjiang Academy of Sciences in Harbin city.

The global targets can inform national wetland biodiversity conservation strategies, the paper said, stressing that many such strategies currently lack wetland targets.

National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) aim to enable a country to achieve its COP15 biodiversity targets through considering legal and policy frameworks.

NBSAPs can be lengthy to develop, with only a handful of regions having updated them since the COP15 biodiversity conference in 2022, including the EU and Japan, but more releases are expected this year.

Under the conservative, moderate, and ambitious scenarios, an additional 9%, 42%, and 56% of wetlands should be protected respectively, the researchers said.

This would mean protecting between 1.5% and 4.5% more of each continent’s area under the ambitious target.

The research aims to help achieve the post-2025 goals of global wetland conservation by supporting organisations such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, which convened COP15.

The proportion of protected and unprotected wetland conservation priorities (WCP) on each continent

Source: Nature

Research on wetlands is “urgently” needed but due to methodological uncertainty and data issues, no targets at a global scale for wetlands have yet been published.

“Indicators exist for wetland extent, overall biodiversity, and human impact, but all three must be considered simultaneously for the prioritisation of wetland conservation,” the report said.

“We propose an assessment model to identify wetland conservation projects and set conservation targets for global wetland protected area optimisation.”

Around 3.4 million square kilometres of inland wetlands were lost between 1700 and 2020, an area larger than India, academics estimated in a separate Nature paper published last year.

Most countries have no laws for wetland conservation, with scattered policies across different departments, the researchers said.

“This results in protection gaps or conflicts between different departments. Therefore, guidelines that provide specific targets and locations for wetland conservation at both the global and national levels are crucial for improving wetland conservation policies.”

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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