ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ecological and economic issues concerning the loss of the world’s wetlands. Several Beijer Biodiversity Programme papers have indicated that the main policy challenge is wetland valuation. The difficulty of determining what habitats are ‘wetlands’ with any precision, and the extensive and diverse variety of wedand areas, have hindered accurate estimation of the global status of the ecosystems. Natural wetlands perform many important ecological services for humankind – prevention of storm damage, flood and water flow control, support of fisheries, nutrient and waste absorption, and so forth. The use and non-use values of temperate wetlands – which are largely in developed countries – may differ significantly from those of tropical wetlands – which occur mainly in the developing world. Loss of the world’s wetlands is an increasing economic problem because important values are lost, some perhaps irreversibly, when natural wetlands are converted or degraded.
