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Think Water Quality on World Wetland Day 
Canada is among the 138 contracting parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty adopted on February 2, 1971.
Oak Hammock Marsh, Manitoba, February 2, 2004 – World Wetlands Day, celebrated annually around the world, may not break routine for Canadians, but it directly links to a subject that is more than a drop in the bucket of Canadian consciousness: our water resources.
In a 2003 national poll of Canadians conducted for Ducks Unlimited Canada by Western Opinion Research Inc., 43 per cent of people surveyed identified water resources, such as wetlands, lakes and rivers, as the most important focus for environmental protection. Our country is characterized by its abundant water supply so it’s not surprising to see Canadians concerned over the future of our water.
It has been estimated that Canadians are stewards to nearly 25 per cent of Earth’s wetlands. Wetlands and the plants they support are the best water filters nature has to offer. Through natural processes, wetland habitats are capable of removing over 90 per cent of common nutrient pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus and over 70 per cent of the sediment that is carried in waterways. This natural filtering process works so well that constructed wetlands are being used in Canada to clean wastewater like sewage and storm water, a practice that has been going on in Europe for over 50 years.
We also know that wetlands provide critical habitat for wildlife. The North American Wetlands Conservation Council (Canada) states that more than 600 game and non-game species, including one-third of Canada's species at risk, are found in wetland ecosystems.
But even those of us who are intimately familiar with wetlands’ contributions to people and wildlife find that World Wetlands Day doesn’t offer as much of a rallying point as we’d like. Historical data indicate that as much as 70 per cent of wetlands in Canada’s populated areas have disappeared and that land development for agriculture, industry and urbanization prevail over wetland conservation.
The need for increased wetland conservation has been recognized in the reports from formal inquiries into water contamination in Walkerton, Ont., and North Battleford, Sask. Wetlands are part of healthy, functioning watersheds and when teamed with constructed water treatment facilities, they contribute to safeguarding water quality.
To empower wetland protection, we need to be able to equate wetland loss and the accompanying reduction of societal benefit to the expenses that result, be they increased construction of water treatment plants, increased investments in habitat restoration or development of programs to secure a future for endangered wildlife species.
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) takes us a step closer to recognizing and quantifying Canada’s environmental capital in its recently released publication entitled Environment and Sustainable Development Indicators for Canada. NRTEE identified six environmental indicators to supplement commonly adopted economic indicators like gross domestic product. If NRTEE’s recommendations are accepted, extent of wetlands would find a place on Canada’s balance sheet along with air quality, fresh water, combating climate change, retained forest cover and education of Canadians, referred to by NRTEE as human capital. These new indicators would help evaluate the effect of current economic activities on the requirements of future generations of Canadians if they too are to enjoy and prosper from a healthy environment.
Of the six proposed indicators, wetlands are unique in that there is no existing national inventory of wetland status from which benchmarks can be established. On this World Wetlands Day, we can celebrate that development of a national wetland inventory is currently underway through a partnership among Environment Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, Ducks Unlimited Canada and others.
Ultimately, the indicators proposed by NRTEE could serve as a basis to help quantitatively define natural areas’ contributions to Canada’s people, environment and economy and lead to increased widespread conservation of these areas. Until that day, as we continue to enjoy our summer lakefront properties, our back country canoe trips on pristine waters and our hikes along mountain streams, think of the wetlands and the other natural areas that work behind these scenes to further our enjoyment of life in Canada. To you and yours a happy World Wetlands Day. May there be many more.
For more information:
Lauralou Cicierski, l_cicierski@ducks.ca
National Media and Public Relations Coordinator
Ducks Unlimited Canada
Tel: (204) 467-3252
