A Wetland Wilderness for Wildlife and People: Case study links on the economics of wetland restoration

While it is clear that nature should be protected and enhanced for its own sake, by doing that there are spin-off benefits for people. Decision-makers though, often listen more carefully when a case is made for nature benefiting the economy.

Here are some useful web links from outside Ireland that point toward the socio-economic outputs of protecting and restoring wetlands

There are many other projects that can be found across the globe that have relevance to developing our own project. The project links provide sound evidence that restoring wetlands brings economic benefits and not always form the standard route of just increased tourism. The role for carbon sequestration, for producing products from wetlands and for sustainable agricultural use of wetlands all have direct economic outputs while of course indirect benefits come from the role in mitigating or preventing flooding, for water supply and for health & well being, all of which are much harder to quantify but probably far more valuable

The Flow Country of northern Scotland:
http://www.flowstothefuture.com/details.html
a project as part of long-term landscape scale efforts to restore blanket peatlands on a huge scale which support wetland and moorland birds and other species and contributing to climate change adaptation, tourism and the local economy

Restoring fens in England:
The projects below illustrate the high economic value attained through restoration of even high quality land and the sensible economics of restoring former indutrial siutes ot wetlands.

Ouse Fen & RSPB reedbed sites:

Wicken Fen National Trust:

Restoring peatlands in Eastern Europe

The links below cover projects which are restoring peatlands on a vast scale, funded largely by the trading of carbon credits and contributing not only to biodiversity conservation, to local employment but also contruting to climate change mitigation/adaptation.

Tomorrow the blog will look at a vision for a Mid-Shannon Wetland Wilderness Park, the habitats that could be restored and fantastic wildlife that could re-colonise