Rivers and Lakes – Healthy Wetlands

  • Rivers and lakes

By 2030, we aim to safeguard 10 million hectares of high value river and lake wetlands, focusing in 5 basins.

To safeguard and restore the ecological character and hydrological connectivity of river and lake systems, we will focus on reducing pressures and mitigating the impacts from infrastructure development, wetland over-exploitation, agricultural development, hydropower and extractive industries and promoting integrated management plans which are compatible with maintaining wetland ecosystem functioning and the life cycles of wetland species.

We are working to:

  • Communicate species and wetland status trends and scenarios linking them to biodiversity, policies, goals and targets
  • Enable innovation for scalable best practice wetland management and tools and approaches
  • Stimulate the uptake and adoption of decision support tools and environmental flows that safeguard water regime for resilient wetland ecosystem services
  • Enable uptake of integral management solutions to conserve key river and lake species, linked with decisions over habitat conservation and restoration and water flows affecting flyways and swimways
  • Influence major investors such as development banks to align sustainable development investment and related safeguards to further integrated wetland and water resilience
  • Support the formulation and implementation of master plans for sustainable development at the basin or major wetland system scale
  • Embed and advocate for improved water resilience measures to be targeted in government policy commitments

This will result in biodiversity and ecosystem services being safeguarded and enhanced for many high-value river and lake systems.