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WETwin Newsletters
Issue 1 (2/2010)
PI: T Hein
(2008-2011)
Wetlands provide multiple services for the biosphere of our planet as well as for the human society: They are able to improve drinking water quality, to purify nutrient-rich river water, to protect human settlements from floods and to supply agricultural land with nutrients. In addition to this, such ecosystems increase the overall stability of the earth’s biosphere, acting as buffers against global change factors such as increasing temperature, droughts, floods and other extreme events. Within the past 150 years, wetlands have been largely threatened and degraded due to human activities like flood protection measures, intensive agriculture or the building of electric power plants and human settlements. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to preserve and ameliorate the ecological state of the remaining wetlands. Despite their protection by international contracts like the Ramsar convention, sustainable and wise management of these key ecosystems is still rare.
The project WETwin, supported by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission, is based on the “ecosystem services approach” defined in the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment” of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as well as on the UNESCO-HELP approach. WETwin aims at developing a broadly applicable toolbox which allows wetland managers to find sustainable, realistic and appropriate management options and to decide for the best compromise solution. Thereby, the needs of the local population (for example safe drinking water or maintenance of agricultural land) are considered as well as the requirements of a healthy ecosystem itself. Special emphasis is placed on the interactions between river basin and wetland scale on the one hand and on global (climate) change aspects on the other hand. The toolbox is built up in a modular way and may contain software tools (simulation- and decision support tools) as well as questionnaires for local inhabitants and decision makers and expert judgement systems.
Six wetlands on three continents (Europe, Africa, South America) differing in size and character, are taken as examples for finding such optimal management strategies. In this way, the project WETwin also aims at enhancing north-south and south-south cooperation. Within this project, WasserKluster Lunz collaborates with the following international partner institutions: VITUKI, Budapest; Soresma, Belgium; Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK); UNESCO-IHE, Institute for Water Education; NGO Wetlands International; NWSC, Uganda; IWMI, South Africa; ESPOL, Ecuador. |
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Wasser Cluster Lunz