The Disappearing Wetlands

The world’s wetlands are disappearing three times faster than its forests, with 90% lost since the 1700s. These vanishing ecosystems play a crucial role in storing and cleaning water, mitigating flood damage, sustaining biodiversity, providing us with food and storing huge amounts of carbon.

Protecting wetlands

Polesia is Europe’s largest wetland wilderness and greatest floodplain region. Some of the continent’s last ‘wild’ rivers meander across the landscape, through a vast patchwork of carbon storing peatlands and forests, islands, lakes, bogs and wet meadows. Stretching across Belarus and Ukraine, spreading into Russia in the East and Poland in the West, Polesia covers more than 18 million hectares – about half the size of Germany. This is crucial habitat for struggling wildlife. The area harbours 60% of the world’s remaining aquatic warbler population and is the most important breeding ground west of Russia for the globally threatened Greater Spotted Eagle. Hundreds of thousands of migratory birds stopover in Polesia each year to rest, feed and breed while large mammals, like wolf, lynx and European bison, occur in significant numbers.

Click here to read original article ...

Click here for more information ...