Wetlands solutions for water resilience and disaster-risk reduction

Wetlands store and purify water, harvest unique biodiversity, and are among the most efficient carbon storing ecosystems. They are of global importance for biodiversity conservation at genetic, species and ecosystem levels; they provide habitats and refuges for endangered species in a changing climate.

The science is clear. If we are to keep 1.5C within reach, we need to urgently safeguard and restore wetlands, particularly because today, wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests. As Nature-based Solutions to climate change with far-reaching benefits for people and nature, wetlands – including peatlands, marshes, rivers and lakes, deltas, floodplains and flooded forests – offer a way for our countries to achieve more ambitious climate plans. Nature-based solutions are the smartest investments to draw down carbon from the atmosphere and reach net-zero.

The science and technical know-how for this is well established. Affordable, accessible and scalable nature-based solutions are ready to be deployed, with local communities at the heart of this action.

We now urgently need to scale up the safeguarding and restoration of wetlands. Implementing nature-based solutions, including safeguarding and restoring wetlands, holds the key to one-third of the climate solution. Wetlands are also multifunctional nature-based solutions to mitigate soil erosion, runoff, floods, droughts. They offer water management ecosystem services that enhance the resilience to floods, reduce the severity or duration of droughts, filter and mitigate inorganic pollution.

We need the EU and Member States to invest in conserving and restoring wetlands as a key strategy to contribute to their climate commitments and to reduce and mitigate disaster risks. Governance, policy, financing, must be mobilised at full scale.

This event will explore the EU policy context relating to water resilience, setting the scene for wetlands conservation and restoration with benefits for disaster risk reduction; we will then highlight solutions applied throughout Europe to boost water storage capacities, mitigate floods, fires or pollution mitigation.

The event will inform, highlight case-examples and aims to convince policy-makers, investors, academia, civil society of the benefits of wetlands restoration for water resilience.