World Wetlands Day 2026: Integrating Traditional Knowledge for Climate Resilience

"The 2026 edition is held under the theme "Wetlands and traditional knowledge: Celebrating cultural heritage," drawing attention to the long-standing relationships between wetland ecosystems and the cultural practices, knowledge systems, and governance structures developed by communities over centuries. The theme highlights how inherited ecological knowledge, often embedded in rituals, seasonal calendars, land-use practices, and spatial organization, has shaped resilient interactions between human settlements and water-based landscapes."

"Although wetlands cover only around six percent of the Earth's land surface, they support approximately 40 percent of all plant and animal species and deliver essential ecosystem services, including flood regulation, water purification, carbon storage, and climate moderation. More than one billion people worldwide depend directly on wetlands for livelihoods, food production, and economic activity, underscoring their relevance to both ecological systems and human settlement patterns."

World Wetlands Day on February 2 commemorates the Ramsar Convention and recognizes wetlands' roles in environmental protection and sustainable development. The 2026 theme, Wetlands and traditional knowledge: Celebrating cultural heritage, emphasizes long-standing relationships between wetland ecosystems and community knowledge, rituals, seasonal calendars, land-use practices, and governance. Wetlands are ecosystems where water controls conditions and include freshwater, marine, coastal, and human-made systems such as rivers, lakes, marshes, peatlands, deltas, mangroves, tidal flats, coral reefs, rice paddies, reservoirs, and fishponds. Although wetlands cover about six percent of land, they support roughly 40 percent of species, provide flood regulation, water purification, carbon storage, and climate moderation, and sustain over one billion livelihoods. Since 1970, an estimated 35 percent of wetlands have been lost.

Read at ArchDaily