World Wetlands Day 2025
Photo Credit: Stuart Chape
World Wetlands Day 2025 will focus on the theme, ‘Wetlands and People’. The Day aims to highlight how all aspects of human well-being, including environmental, mental, and physical, are tied to the health of wetlands.
Wetlands are defined as both freshwater and coastal and marine ecosystems and include all lakes and rivers, swamps, marshes, peatlands, estuaries, deltas, tidal flats, mangroves, coral reefs, and underground aquifers. These areas are critical to people and nature for both their intrinsic value and their benefits and services, which contribute to human well-being and sustainable development. Despite the critical role of wetlands, they are among the ecosystems with the highest rates of decline, loss, and degradation. Wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests.
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) designated 2 February as World Wetlands Day. The Day aims to raise global awareness about the vital role of wetlands for people and the planet. The Day also marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on 2 February 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
Source : https://sdg.iisd.org/events/world-wetlands-day-2024/
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World Wetlands Day 2025
Photo Credit: Stuart Chape
“Protecting Wetlands for Our Common Future” is the theme for World Wetlands Day 2025. The theme underscores the urgency of bold action to protect these natural habitats for the welfare of all people – and so future generations can continue to benefit from all that wetlands provide.
World Wetlands Day, celebrated each year on 2 February, marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention) on 2 February 1971 in Ramsar, Iran.
Wetlands are among the world’s most diverse productive environments; cradles of biological diversity that provide the water and productivity upon which countless species of plants and animals depend for survival. Wetlands are indispensable for the countless benefits or “ecosystem services” that they provide humanity, ranging from freshwater supply, food and building materials, and biodiversity, to flood control, groundwater recharge, and climate change mitigation. Wetlands are also essential for biodiversity: though wetlands cover only around 6% of the Earth’s land surface, 40% of all plant and animal species live or breed in wetlands.
However, wetlands as the most threatened ecosystem. According to the World Heritage and Ramsar Conventions, 64% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since the beginning of the last century. In most regions across the world, wetlands continue to decline compromising the benefits that wetlands provide to people. According to the Global Wetland Outlook, we lose wetlands three times faster than natural forests. Therefore, the conservation of wetlands is a vital task of humanity, which can help achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Wetlands are defined as both freshwater and coastal and marine ecosystems and include all lakes and rivers, swamps, marshes, peatlands, estuaries, deltas, tidal flats, mangroves, coral reefs, and underground aquifers. These areas are critical to people and nature for both their intrinsic value and their benefits and services, which contribute to human well-being and sustainable development. Despite the critical role of wetlands, they are among the ecosystems with the highest rates of decline, loss, and degradation. Wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests.
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) designated 2 February as World Wetlands Day. The Day aims to raise global awareness about the vital role of wetlands for people and the planet. The Day also marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on 2 February 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
Source : Official website of World Wetlands Day by Ramsar – 2 February – World Wetlands Day
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