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Wetland vision - restoring the UK's 'lost' wetlands (17/07/08)

Greetings CEPA list members:

Two related stories from the UK on wetland restoration:

1. England has announced plans to restore significant areas of ponds, lakes and marshes which have been drained and developed in the past for other uses. Working in collaboration with a number of key conservation groups (such Natural England, RSPB, and The Wildlife Trusts) government agencies have developed a Wetland Vision which will map the past, present and future for wetlands and identify the potential for restoring ‘lost’ wetlands in six selected areas. The national ‘vision’ has been developed from the six local visions of what the areas should look like.

The plan is to spend up to £2 million a year over the next three years in selected restoration projects covering thousands of acres. Read the full news story here http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4282183.ece

2.  A related document is Integrating ecosystem services within a 50-year Vision for wetlands, developed as an annex for the Wetland Vision Technical Document, and researched and written by Rob McInnes of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (an active observer on Ramsar’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel in his spare time!). 

The Vision partnership recognised that more explicitly including ecosystem services in the vision would bring added strength to it and this report set out to provide material that will help broaden the England Wetland Vision, demonstrating the benefits of, and the approach to, describing ecosystem services. It has been broadly noted that the concept of ecosystem services and the language associated with it are still not effectively used or understood by either professional or lay audiences and that there is much room for improvement here. This report has used case study material to show analytically how the national and local visions can be improved through an assessment of the language and terminology used to articulate ecosystem services in the six visions. Following this a number of recommendations are provided on how the England Wetland Vision could address ecosystem services more fully, how background case study material could be better analysed to define ecosystem services, and the kind of language that could be used to convey the ecosystem concept to a wide audiences.

This report can be downloaded here: http://www.wetlandvision.org.uk/userfiles/File/Annex2_EcosystemServicesScopingReport.pdf

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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Hello again everyone:  

Since several people have shown interest in the message I sent below, I should note for those of you that have not realised, that there is a wetland vision website with full details on the development of the Wetland Vision - look here http://www.wetlandvision.org.uk/.