Rights of Wetlands Review

The ‘Rights of Wetlands Operationalisation for Biodiversity and Community Resilience’ project focuses on how to deliver Rights of Wetlands and Rights of Nature in practice. Despite recognition that wetlands deliver multiple benefits, particularly for the poor and marginalised, widespread wetland loss and deterioration continues contributing to climate destabilisation and biodiversity declines. New approaches are required for wetland conservation and to sustain wetland benefits. The Rights of Wetlands Review is a working document that will be further developed throughout the lifetime of the project: 2023 to 2026. It introduces Rights of Wetlands with selected examples of implementation across the world. Reviews of the policy, legislation, governance, communication and management contexts of the five project countries - Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Sri Lanka and Kenya - are also provided to illustrate where each country, and their wetland communities, are in terms of delivering a Rights of Wetlands or a Rights of Nature approach. In Sri Lanka, for example, the government are investigating the development of a policy on Living Entities. Living Entities are ecological spaces which have their own legal characteristics, features, functions, legal rights and spirits. It is being developed to reframe the relationship between humans and nature moving from a heavily anthropocentric approach of safeguarding human interests, often at the expense of the integrity of the ecological spaces, to one of respect, equity and kinship with nature. Read the whole report here