Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, Hubei Province is rich in fresh water resources and is known as the province of a thousand lakes.
As its moniker suggests, Hubei boasts wetlands of 1.445 million hectares, accounting for 7.8 percent of China’s whole land.
A refuge and an ecological barrier
The 1980's textile boom in Mauritius drove many women to work in textile factories. However, when the textile factories closed, women became unemployed and could no longer send their children to school.
"Women were still jobless, staying at home, suffering from domestic violence and having babies almost every year. So in 2006, after meeting with 20 women, all of them unemployed mothers, we decided to use their traditional knowledge about conservation to cultivate medicinal plants, conserve biodiversity and improve their livelihood." - Anooradah Pooran
Brazil is at the top among the 18 megadiverse countries. It hosts between 15 and 20 per cent of the world’s biological diversity, with more than 120,000 species of invertebrates, about 9,000 vertebrates and more than 4,000 plant species. With this comes huge potential to boost economic growth and social inclusion, but also a huge responsibility.
The world’s oceans are a vast mystery. For centuries, people have been on a quest to cross, dive deep into, and understand them – and there is still a long way to go. Ocean species have shown civilizations how to navigate and harvest these waters; more than three billion people depend on the oceans as a breadbasket, providing food and employment. Oceans cover 75 percent of the world’s surface and regulate the planet in ways both intricate and profound.
In 1990, Edwin Duffus, a pig hunter, walked into the Hope Zoo in Kingston, Jamaica and handed over a large lizard his dog had retrieved while hunting in Hellshire Hills.
His day in the woods would change the destiny of an entire species — the lizard was a Jamaican iguana that since 1948 had been thought extinct.
Although the iguana didn’t survive its injuries — dogs are one of their biggest predators — Mr Duffus was able to tell the staff exactly where he’d found it, and a subsequent expedition discovered two nesting sites and a small family of iguanas.
After Hurricane Isidore hit the west coast of Mexico in 2002 – at the time the second-most intense Atlantic hurricane to have ever struck there - local women got together to rectify the devastation, starting with a water committee.
Their work started as a recovery programme, and has since blossomed into a comprehensive project for resilient guardianship of the ecosystems that give life and livelihood.
Many hands make light work
Wetlands are diverse and productive habitats – a vital source of biome health, sometimes thought of as the 'kidneys of the earth'. Just like a giant kidney that filters our blood to remove unwanted by-products and waste, wetlands have a unique ability to store, assimilate, and transform contaminants lost from the land before they reach waterways. Like a kidney, wetlands help to dilute and filter material that could otherwise harm our lakes, rivers and other waterways.
This fundamental function makes wetlands a sacred place, and a critical source of freshwater.
There is so much innate beauty in Belize. The tiny country — just 22,970 square kilometres —has rich lush forests, and sweeping coral reefs which are home to a vast range of species.
Biodiversity is one of Belize’s many treasures, and one of the reasons people visit from all over the world.
However maintaining it is an on-going battle, one that UNDP and its local partners have been fighting for 25 years.
The people of Africa live on the frontlines of climate change. While the continent as a whole is rising – with strong economic growth and social progress over the past 10 years – droughts, floods, rising seas, and ever-more intense storms threaten to derail these gains, reinforce hard-to-break poverty traps, and unravel our global race to end poverty and hunger by 2030.
In a country where 90 percent of the population relies on natural resources for food, income, and jobs—especially the coffee sector—efforts to restore degraded landscapes are also restoring hope for a better future.
