Wed 8th Oct 2008, 10:30–11:00
The aim of the session was to raise awareness of the Integrated Wetland Assessment Toolkit that has been developed through a 3-year project funded by the UK Darwin Initiative, receive feedback on the project, and to make contact with potential users of the Toolkit.
The session leaders (David Allen, IUCN Species Programme; Oliver Springate-Baginski, University of East Anglia) presented the results of the 3 year project which has developed the integrated wetland assessment Toolkit. Traditional ‘dis-integrated’ assessment methods often fail to fully value wetlands, leading to wetland loss and degradation. The integrated approach presents a number of benefits and synergies; improves insights for each component – biodiversity, livelihoods, and socio-economic value; a more holistic picture of the full value of a wetland than collected studies from each respective discipline can provide; and, more systematic fieldwork, optimising resources and investigators time, and reducing respondent fatigue. The IWA approach aims to produce policy-relevant arguments for wetland conservation.
The key project output, the IWA Toolkit, was ‘pre-launched’ (the Toolkit is to be published in December 2008).
