The project “Integrating Wetland Economic Values into River Basin Management” has the overall goal of more equitable, efficient and sustainable wetland and river basin management resulting from the practical application of environmental economics techniques and measures.
To help to achieve this goal, its immediate objectives are:
- To increase awareness and capacity among planners, policy-makers and managers to identify and use economic measures for wetland conservation.
- To generate and disseminate practical and policy-relevant tools and examples of the use of economic measures for wetland conservation.
- To assess environmental economic aspects of wetland and river basin management at key sites, including the identification of wetland values, economic causes of wetland loss, incentives and financing mechanisms for wetland conservation.
- To work with local communities, government and non-government agencies and the private sector to integrate wetland economic values into development and conservation decision-making and to pilot concrete economic measures for wetland management.
National, regional and global case studies, policy briefs and technical working papers are being carried out as part of this project. These deal with the practical application of environmental economics techniques and measures to ecosystem and river basin management in different regions of the world, including Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The project has involved developing and applying economic assessment tools for assessing the value of water-related ecosystems in river basins, in order to provide practical and policy-relevant information to be used in the context of addressing real-world river basin management issues. This document summarises these valuation case studies, all of which were carried out by IUCN and its partners within the context of planning, managing and implementing an ecosystem approach to wetland and river basin management, including projects in Zambia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Cameroon, Pakistan, east Africa, Lao, and Kenya.
