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Q&A: "Wetlands Have Had a Pretty Raw Deal, Historically"

Interview with John Dini

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 30 2007 (IPS) - Environmental organisations can work with developers to manage wetlands in urban areas, says John Dini: programme manager at Working for Wetlands, a state organisation that tries to ensure the long term viability of wetlands in South Africa.

He made this statement when conservation groups, property developers and government officials met east of Johannesburg last week for the National Wetlands Indaba, an annual gathering held to discuss issues related to the management of wetlands.

IPS&#39s Steven Lang spoke to Dini to find out more about wetlands and how his organisation works to protect them.

IPS: Give us a few details about Working for Wetlands.

John Dini (JD): We are a government led programme that spans the jurisdictions of a number of departments because wetlands do not fall squarely under one department. We are a programme of the Departments of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Water Affairs and Forestry, and Agriculture.

Our main focus at the moment is on trying to turn back that clock a little bit. It’s on rehabilitating wetlands that have been degraded as a result of human activities.

IPS: How do you do this?

JD: What we’ve found is that erosion is a huge threat to many of the wetlands in our country. Erosion is essentially a natural process…We see it all around us – it’s how landscapes evolve over time. But I guess just like extinction or climate change, what we’re finding is that human activity has greatly accelerated natural rates of erosion, and our wetlands are particularly susceptible to erosion.

So, a great deal of our work involves erosion control. It involves building structures, be they made out of wire mesh baskets filled with stones – they’re called gabians – or small concrete structures, or earth structures, or using bio-engineering, which essentially means using plants to help us do erosion control.

We build those structures in the erosion dongas (gullies) in the wetlands to stop the erosion from essentially eating up the wetland and completely destroying it, or to catch sediment that’s coming downstream so that we can try and re-stabilise the sediment in the wetland.

IPS: Why do wetlands need special attention, different to that given to lakes or rivers?

JD: Wetlands have had a pretty raw deal, historically. For many years people saw them as wastelands, areas that didn’t smell particularly nice, didn’t look particularly nice, you couldn’t farm them, you couldn’t build houses on them, couldn’t do much with them, mosquitoes lived in them, the frogs made a noise at night.

So for many years, wetlands were seen as a nuisance – you know, something that needed to be either filled or drained in order to be of productive use.

IPS: You&#39ve noted that wetlands perform many useful services, such as purifying water. How do they do this?

JD: The chemical environment in wetlands is quite unique because what happens when soil gets saturated with water for a prolonged period (is) the oxygen in the soil profile gets used up, so the environment becomes anaerobic. It becomes oxygen deficient, and that allows a whole lot of biochemical processes and geochemical processes to work.

Wetlands become quite good at mopping up toxins out of water. They’re especially good at absorbing heavy metals for example – a lot of those that are generated by the mining industry, that get discharged in mine effluent and through acid mine drainage.

They’re also very good at mopping up nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, which typically you find in fertilisers used in agriculture and also in sewage discharges.

IPS: But aren&#39t wetlands also places where malaria mosquitoes breed?

JD: They are, and that’s part of the reason they’ve got a bad rap. In fact a lot of wetlands have been drained for public health purposes, but unfortunately a lot of other benefits get lost at the same time.

But having said that, you know, draining all our wetlands won’t solve our malaria problem, because many of our mosquitoes breed (in other places).

IPS: In South Africa, where are the red alerts as concerns wetlands?

JD: I think our urban areas are particularly vulnerable because the pace of development is so rapid. We frequently see wetlands being filled in for the building of houses or shopping malls.

We also have a lot of peat being mined in this country…(But) it develops at less than a millimetre per year, which means that when a metre of peat is mined, it will take about a thousand years for it to regenerate.

There is also a lot of uncontrolled agricultural development where farmers are completely disregarding the law and draining wetlands, filling them in, transforming the indigenous vegetation for their own purposes.

Many of them do this at their peril. When the floods come down and those wetlands next to the river have been converted, there is nothing left to buffer those floods and a lot of those farmers will see all of their topsoil ending up down the streams.

IPS: How significant is the biodiversity in wetlands?

JD: There’s really a wealth of species, be it plant or animal species, because wetlands are actually quite extreme places. You know for plants they are quite harsh places to grow because most plants need to breathe through their roots; in an oxygen-poor environment a normal terrestrial plant could never survive.

So you have species that are specially adapted. They can live only in wetland environments because they’ve developed other ways of getting around this problem, which means that these plants are limited to wetlands. And if we trash our wetlands, we’ve trashed the habitat for these plants.

There is also a number of animal species. I think the most noteworthy would be amphibians and birds. In fact there’s an entire convention and an international agreement on wetland conservation that started out life by saying we’ve got to look at wetlands as habitats for migratory water birds.

And if we want to conserve these water birds that depend on wetlands, countries actually have to co-operate with each other, because these birds don’t belong to any one country. They move across international boundaries.