BENGALURU: At 82, India has now surpassed China in the number of designated Ramsar sites, but this comes at a time when the world has already lost 87% of its wetlands, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands Dr Musonda Mumba has said.
Speaking at the Sinhasi Social Impact Initiative Conference 2 on “Wetland Conservation and Climate Change” on Sunday, Dr Mumba urged immediate and large-scale action to protect these fragile ecosystems, which are disappearing three times faster than forests.
Dr Mumba touched upon the alarming rate of wetland loss, the link between wetlands and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the role of communities in conservation, and the need to treat wetlands as critical natural infrastructure.
She praised India’s cultural and ecological connection to wetlands, pointing to the pressures on urban wetlands like in Bengaluru, and stressed the importance of better monitoring, funding, and partnerships. She also highlighted the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Zimbabwe and the Global Wetland Outlook, which will assess the real cost of wetland loss.
Highlighting about the upcoming Global Wetland Outlook, to be released at COP15, Dr Mumba said, “We are trying to quantify the cost of losing wetlands — not just financially, but in terms of biodiversity, livelihoods, and resilience. What would it cost if we lost a wetland like Yashwant Sagar in Indore? What are the public and private investments needed to protect such sites? The report will also examine how agriculture and land-use change remain among the biggest drivers of wetland loss, and how financial flows must be unlocked to preserve them. We need to start valuing wetlands as natural capital and invest accordingly,” she said.
Dr Mumba, who visited India for the first time last year, highlighted that wetlands are not only intrinsic to India’s geography — from the frozen wetlands of the Himalayas to the Sundarbans — but also to its culture and food systems, including rice paddies. She, however, pointed out that wetlands are often treated as wastelands. Species dependent on wetlands are vanishing. Some are threatened, others already extinct, she added.
Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Meenakshi Negi, said conservation and development must go hand-in-hand, and stressed on the need to build resilient institutions that can deliver on global environmental targets.
Sharing an example from her previous role at the National Commission for Women, Negi spoke about how women serving life sentences in prisons were trained to convert water hyacinth — an invasive aquatic plant — into eco-friendly paper and fibre products. She said that such convergence — between entrepreneurship, sustainability, and rehabilitation — is key to building inclusive and effective conservation models. “We need to shift from just policy to practice. Without on-ground change, targets will remain on paper,” she added.