More than 40 specialists on wetlands attended a recent workshop held in HCM City to share lessons learned from ongoing work in the Mekong Basin and identify priority areas for future work.
It was organised by the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Presentations by the IUCN, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) on projects in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Soc Trang in Viet Nam focused on site-based interventions.
They illustrated examples of wetlands management based on co-management approaches whereby local communities and Government negotiate an agreement that specifies the rights, roles and responsibilities of both parties.
Co-management is a form of management that lies between full State control and exclusive local community, and appears to be suitable for managing wetlands given their inherent variability over place and time.
The presentations also highlighted issues that still need to be addressed.
At the national level, they said, enabling environments were lacking due to gaps in wetlands policies and laws, and there was limited appreciation of the economic value of the ecosystem goods and services that wetlands provide.
The MRC said: "For example, all wetland protected areas in Viet Nam are designated as Special-Use Forest (SUF) and managed as forests rather than wetlands.
"In the case of Tram Chim National Park, this led to a focus on fire suppression rather than maintenance of the park’s wetlands as habitat for globally threatened birds."
A decree was issued in 2003 defining wetlands and their management objectives but it has not been implemented because SUF management is the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development while wetlands come under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment.
As a result, no wetlands conservation areas had been designated, the MRC said.
Other presentations at the workshop showed that the MRC’s Environment Division was working on basin-wide wetlands inventory and valuation, regularly providing information on the value of basin fisheries and projecting what might happen to wetlands there under different development scenarios.
The workshop also celebrated World Wetlands Day, February 2, when the Convention on Wetlands was adopted in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran.
There are 158 signatories and 1,828 wetland sites totalling 169 million ha designated as Wetlands of International Importance.
The countries of the Lower Mekong Basin have embraced the convention with various degrees of enthusiasm.
There are 11 Ramsar sites in Thailand, three in Cambodia, two in Viet Nam, and none in Laos, which has not yet ratified the convention.
Of these, only three in Thailand and two in Cambodia are in the Mekong Basin.
Although new sites in the basin have been proposed, the limited interest in Ramsar sites arguably reflects the need for more awareness at Government level.