Governing the urban wetlands: a multiple case-study of policy, institutions and reference points

Abstract

SUMMARYWorldwide, coastal and floodplain wetlands are rapidly urbanizing, making them highly vulnerable to biodiversity loss, biological invasion and climate change. Yet urban wetlands management is an understudied area of global environmental research. Different policy approaches and institutional arrangements in place for urban wetlands governance have to be studied comparatively to obtain a better understanding of the current issues. This paper investigates four urban wetland policy regimes and the application of ecological reference points across four countries. The regimes are discussed within the context of global policy trends, urbanization patterns and environmental change. The analysis illustrates that the four cases deviate substantially in certain characteristics and converge in others. Global trends such as environmental treaties and restructuring of city spaces are common policy drivers for all cases. Conversely, the localized specific problems have yielded specialized policy responses in each case. Declaration of fixed biological reference points for wetlands were not used at any stage of the policy development process. However, the wetland managers formally or informally set up ecosystem-services oriented benchmarks for urban wetland management. Globally-applicable normative policy directives or universal ecological reference points seem bound to fail in urban wetlands governance. However, in designing effective urban wetland policy and institutions at the regional scale, both context-specific and generalized lessons from empirical policy evaluation of multiple case studies need to be jointly considered. Based on the characteristics of the policy regimes analysed in this study, a hypothetical framework for urban wetland policy evaluation is proposed; this has yet to be validated by empirical application to actual cases.

Forty-three years of Ramsar and urban wetlands

“…These arguments have been empirically confirmed in recent urban wetlands research (Hettiarachchi et al 2013;Ehrenfeld 2004;Azous & Horner 2001). Urban wetlands are threatened by alarming levels of degradation and loss in both developing (emerging) and post-industrial cities.…”

Rapid Assessment of Wetland Ecosystem Services (RAWES): An example from Colombo, Sri Lanka

“…The results of the RAWES approach highlighted significant environmentlivelihoods aspects which have been considered important for similar wetland systems in Sri Lanka (Sellamuttu et al, 2011) and also provided information in order to address the concern that some wetlands in Colombo are no longer considered a valuable resource by the community (Hettiarachchi et al, 2014a). The identification of 35 different and diverse ecosystem services has the ability to broaden the discussion around the importance of wetlands within Colombo and presents values based on ecosystem services rather than values based solely on nature conservation (Hettiarachchi et al, 2014c). Consequently, irrespective of the inherent subjectivity around the use of a rapid technique, the ability to recognise a multiplicity of wetland ecosystem services has made a significant contribution to discussions around the future wise use of wetlands in urban Colombo (McInnes et al, 2016c).…”

Maps, laws and planning policy: Working with biophysical and spatial uncertainty in the case of sea level rise

“…The chronic erosion of the Yangtze River delta has been linked to the reduced sediment yield as a result of the Three Gorges Dam (Yang et al, 2011). Syvitski et al (2009) estimated that 85% of deltas, supporting around half a billion people, have experienced severe flooding during the last decade and that at least a 50% increase in flooding can be expected under current SLR forecasts (also see Hettiarachchi et al, 2014). Accurately measuring such processes and constraining decadal to centennial trends have remained elusive and require improved techniques (Kolker et al, 2011).…”