“Let us protect wetlands”

Veronica Gwaze

THE Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) and Community Water Alliance (CWA) on Tuesday joined the world in commemorating World Wetlands Day.

The day is celebrated on February 2 to raise awareness on the vital role wetlands play in the ecosystem.

It also marks the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971.

Wetlands are areas such as marshes, lakes, rivers, ponds, floodplains and swamps that are saturated or flooded with water either permanently or seasonally.

This year’s celebration, which ran under the theme “Inseparable: Water, Wetlands and Life”, came at a time when most urban councils, particularly Harare, Ruwa and Chitungwiza, have come under renewed scrutiny for corruptly parcelling out residential and commercial stands on wetlands.

“With flooding hard-hitting residents whose houses are built on wetlands within Zimbabwean local authorities (latest being Chitungwiza), the agenda of wetlands preservation should or ought to be a twin agenda with fighting the Covid-19 pandemic,” reads part of a statement issued by CHRA.

“It is clear that the real problem facing wetlands is the depletion of this natural resource, the root causes to that depletion include among other things, construction of buildings on wetlands, agriculture or cropping on wetlands, poor governance, competing interests on land, lack of adequate information and corruption.”

According to CHRA, the contextual realities of Covid-19 currently faced by global citizens where one of the protocols to prevent the pandemic include “hand washing with soap under running water” places the trifecta of water, wetlands and life as complimentary parts of one body.