Wetland Values

The importance of a wetland depends on its values and the criteria on which it is assessed. Thus, one wetland may be significant for its biodiversity and natural values, while other wetlands might be important for their productivity or human use values. When assigning significance or importance to a wetlands, care must be taken that there is clarity on which values are being used.

Wetland values simply refer to the values or important aspects of a wetland. These values include any aspect of wetland ecology health and economics, as well as encompassing public amenities and safety. Wetland environmental values are the physical and biological characteristics of the wetland and the ecological, social and economic aspects are benefits provided by them.

The wetland processes are considered as the default values that should be protected in any wetland, as they are necessary for the other values of the wetland to be maintained (hydrological processes, food webs, physical habitats, nutrient cycling, sediment trapping and stabilisation).

A full suite of wetland values has been developed and can be used as the starting point for identifying the environmental values of a specific wetland. This table incorporates the values in the Millennium Report: Ecosystems and Human Well Being: Wetlands and Water and the Water Environmental Protection Policy.

Some wetlands may contain a suite of distinct wetland habitats (for example, a coastal estuary might contain coral and rocky reef, seagrass, mangroves and saltmarsh), and there might be a variety of different values or functions that make up the wetland.

There are usually significant variations in management and buffer requirements required to protect each of the wetland habitats and values.

Wetland ecosystems are part of our natural wealth. At a worldwide scale they provide us with services worth trillions of US dollars every year – entirely free of charge – making a vital contribution to human health and well-being. With the global population set to increase to nine billion by 2050, increasing pressure on water resources and the threats posed by climate change, the need to maximise these benefits has never been greater or more urgent.

The Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) is a partnership of conservation organizations that seek better ways to design, manage, and measure the impacts of their conservation actions.

The set of Ramsar Factsheets profiles the ‘ecosystem services’ – the benefits people obtain from ecosystems – provided by wetlands. They illustrate the great diversity of ecosystem services delivered by wetlands and their values. The factsheets do not cover valuation techniques; a few references to further information on such techniques can be found in the data sources document.