Wetlands receding 'three times faster than forests', experts call for urgent action
When wetlands disappear, carbon that has been locked in the soil is released into the atmosphere. “We are in a crisis,” Martha Rojas Urrego, head of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, told reporters in Geneva, warning of the potentially devastating impact of wetland loss, including on climate change. “We are losing wetlands three times faster than forests,” Rojas Urrego said, describing the Global Wetland Outlook report as a “red flag”. While the world has been increasingly focused on global warming and its impact on oceans and forests, the Ramsar Convention said wetlands remain “dangerously undervalued”. The Ramsar Convention stressed that wetlands are essential to reining in climate change, pointing out that peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests, even though they cover just three percent of all land surface.
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