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WORLD WATER DAY: Warming Threatens Precious Wetlands

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Mar 22 2005 (IPS) - South America’s giant Pantanal wetland could be destroyed should global temperatures rise three to four degrees C., as would 85 percent of the world’s wetlands, according to a new report.

While global climate change is the main threat, the Pantanal, one of the world’s most bio-diverse ecosystems, is also at growing risk from intensive agricultural, industrial and urban development, says the new report from the United Nations University (UNU).

"The Pantanal provides a wide range of important ecological services to the region," says report co-author Paulo Teixeira de Sousa Jr. of Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso.

"Losing it would be a great loss," Teixeira told IPS.

Located in the centre of South America, the Pantanal wetland covers 165,000 square kilometres – an area roughly equal to Florida – in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Considered the world’s largest freshwater wetland, the Pantanal is a complex patchwork of lakes, lagoons, rivers, forest and forest islands.

Dry for half the year and a shallow lake the rest, the Pantanal offers a unique habitat for thousands of species, many endangered, including more than 650 bird species, over 190 species of mammal, 50 reptiles, more than 1,100 butterfly species and 270 fish species. It is also the wintering grounds for a large number of migratory birds that summer in North America.

Climate change could end all that. The UNU analysis says a global temperature increase of just three to four degrees C could eliminate the Pantanal and 85 percent of all remaining wetlands in the world.

Over the past 150 years, human activities have increased the levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other "greenhouse" gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. As a result, the average global temperature had risen .6 degrees C. by the year 2000. Ever increasing emissions of these GHGs will likely result in a two-degree increase in just 10 years, according to a report by the International Climate Change Task Force released in January.

"People generally don’t think a three-degree C. rise in temperature is very much. But what happens when our body’s temperature rises just one degree?" Teixeira said.

Wetlands hold roughly one-sixth of all terrestrial carbon, most of it organic matter in soil, which can be released when the soil is disturbed, for example through wetlands drainage and destruction.

Should significant amounts of carbon in wetlands end up in the atmosphere that could create a positive feedback loop, intensifying the warming and releasing more carbon.

If little is done to reduce emissions over the next 20 years, it may not be possible to prevent the loss of wetlands, Teixeira said.

Today, large parts of the Pantanal are pristine but there is unprecedented pressure from economic development, alterations of its watercourses and conversion to other land uses, he noted.

These pressures began in the 1970s when the Brazilian government opened up remote regions such as the Amazon, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the Pantanal.

Today, in the highlands surrounding the Pantanal, the planting of commercial crops like soybean, corn, sugar cane and cotton has transformed millions of square kilometers of savannah into open fields, said Teixeira, who is also head of the Pantanal Regional Environment Programme.

"Traditional farmers are selling their land to outsiders and large-scale agriculture is taking place," he said. "In most cases, these newcomers do not know how to manage the land in a sustainable way."

Deforestation and agricultural chemicals are having an impact on the region’s water quality and overfishing has been blamed for sharp declines in fish stocks, although Teixeira says there is not enough data to know for certain if it is a problem.

There is a lack of data generally about the ecology of the Pantanal, he observes. It is a very large and complex mosaic of different ecosystems, and there has not been enough money to do the basic research that is needed.

However, scientific studies of the region did squash proposals to build a network of large shipping canals. "They would have dramatically alerted the hydrological functioning of the system," he said.

Hans van Ginkel, a U.N. under-secretary-general and rector of U.N. University, warned in a statement that, "Without extremely careful integrated management, one of the planet’s greatest environmental treasures will be altered forever by human encroachment.."

Other canal projects as well as hydroelectric dams continue to pose a threat to the region. A less obvious development threat turns out to be tourists flocking to enjoy the region’s abundance of wildlife and untouched landscapes.

Tourism has been booming since the 1990s, especially among foreign birdwatchers, Teixeira said. Much of the area is not suitable for development.

"Ecotourism is okay, but traditional tourism is not," he cautioned.

The Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso hopes to establish programmes to teach sustainable management in tourism and to work with the government in determining the best places to set up ecotourism zones. But funding is an ongoing problem, generally because the Amazon gets all the attention.

"It will take local and international support to keep the Pantanal pristine," Teixeira concluded.