Home to many rare and endangered species, the Asan Conservation Reserve becomes India’s latest and the state of Uttarakhand’s first Ramsar site.

With this new addition, the country’s wetlands tally now stands at 38, the highest in South Asia. The Asan Conservation Reserve – known for rare species like the Ruddy Shelduck, Red Crested Pochard, among others – is also a fish-spawning ground and has a lot of biological diversity. The Reserve is located on the banks of Yamuna river near Dehradun district in Garhwal region of the Himalayan state.

In January this year, 10 wetlands in India were recognized by the Ramsar Convention as sites of international importance. In February, the government had proposed 10 more sites to be declared as sites of international importance, including the Asan Conservation Reserve. If the nine other proposed wetlands are approved by the Ramsar Secretariat, India will have 47 sites protected internationally.

The Indian Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change announced this achievement and tweeted, “Ramsar declares Asan Conservation Reserve as a site of international importance. With this, the number of Ramsar sites in India goes up to 38, the highest in South Asia and Uttarakhand gets its first Ramsar site.”  It confirmed that the Asan Conservation Reserve cleared five out of the nine criteria needed to be declared as a Ramsar site and get identified as a Wetland of International Importance. The criteria cleared included the category on species and ecological communities, one on waterbirds and another on fish.

The 10 other wetlands in India that bagged the Ramsar tag are Nandur Madhameshwar in Maharashtra, Keshopur-Miani, Beas Conservation Reserve and Nangal in Punjab, and Nawabganj, Parvati Agra, Saman, Samaspur, Sandi and SarsaiNawar in Uttar Pradesh.

The other Ramsar sites are in Rajasthan, Kerala, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh.

The Ramsar Convention is the oldest of the modern global intergovernmental environmental agreements signed for preserving the ecological character of wetlands. The treaty was negotiated through the 1960s by countries and non-governmental organizations concerned about the increasing loss and degradation of wetland habitat for migratory waterbirds. It was adopted in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971 and came into force in 1975.

The Convention’s mission is “the conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local and national actions and international cooperation, as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development throughout the world”.

Also known as the Convention on Wetlands, it aimed to develop a global network of wetlands for conservation of biological diversity and for sustaining human life. The aim of the Ramsar list is “to develop and maintain an international network of wetlands which are important for the conservation of global biological diversity and sustaining human life through the maintenance of their ecosystem components, processes and benefits.”

The Convention uses a broad definition of wetlands. It includes all lakes and rivers, underground aquifers, swamps and marshes, wet grasslands, peatlands, oases, estuaries, deltas and tidal flats, mangroves and other coastal areas, coral reefs, and all human-made sites such as fish ponds, rice paddies, reservoirs and salt pans.

As the Convention website points out, wetlands provide a wide range of important resources and ecosystem services such as food, water, fibre, groundwater recharge, water purification, flood moderation, erosion control and climate regulation. They are, in fact, a major source of water and our main supply of freshwater comes from an array of wetlands which help soak rainfall and recharge groundwater. Wetlands are vital for human survival. They are among the world’s most productive environments; cradles of biological diversity that provide the water and productivity upon which countless species of plants and animals depend for survival.

Wetlands are indispensable for the countless benefits or “ecosystem services” that they provide humanity, ranging from freshwater supply, food and building materials, and biodiversity, to flood control, groundwater recharge, and climate change mitigation.

As the Convention website points out, wetlands are among the most diverse and productive ecosystems. They provide essential services and supply all our freshwater. However, they continue to be degraded and converted to other uses. Study after study demonstrates that wetland area and quality continue to decline in most regions of the world. As a result, the ecosystem services that wetlands provide to people are compromised.

Managing wetlands is a global challenge and the Convention presently counts 171 countries as Contracting Parties, which recognize the value of having one international treaty dedicated to a single ecosystem.