Little Prespa’s story is virtually retold in Manipur’s context, largely similar to water bodies like the Lampha Pat in Imphal West District and Porompat in Imphal East District that are dead and dying in their present conditions. The story also manifests itself in the story of the Loktak Lake – a Ramsar site – which is generalized as a ‘dying lake’ and academically assessed as an ‘ageing lake’, whatever the connotation is.
By Salam Rajesh
The striking headline of a recent AFP report, “Little Prespa Lake on Albanian-Greek border slowly dying” (3rd October) sounded rather familiar back home in Manipur with similar situation in hand here. Rising temperatures and increasingly mild winters with little snowfall and a scarcity of precipitation had battered the lake, the report stated.
A local resident, Enver Llomi (68), was quoted as saying that only a few years back Little Prespa was a lake with pure water, and for the locals fishing in the lake was their life. “But today we have nothing left. The lake is dead,” Llomi said with remorse and with a heavy heart.
The report profiled the sad picture of the lake. Abandoned boats are now stuck in the mud or rotting in the sun on dry land, and cows have replaced the fish. Plants and reeds have sprouted all over the place where once it was all water. For the locals, the scene of the new greenery around overshadowed a painful truth: the lake is lost for good.
The beginning of the end of the lake’s lifespan dated back to the 1970s when local authorities diverted the Devoll River to irrigate fields around the nearby Albanian city of Korca. The water began to recede and the problems cropped up. Climate change exacerbated the problem, experts observed. Gradually rising temperatures and increasingly mild winters with less snowfall than usual, and a scarcity of precipitation had literally battered the lake, hammering it down to its slow death.
Little Prespa’s story is virtually retold in Manipur’s context, largely similar to water bodies like the Lampha Pat in Imphal West District and Porompat in Imphal East District that are dead and dying in their present conditions. The story also manifests itself in the story of the Loktak Lake – a Ramsar site – which is generalized as a ‘dying lake’ and academically assessed as an ‘ageing lake’, whatever the connotation is.
Christian Dunn, Senior Lecturer in Natural Sciences at Bangor University, writing for The Conversation (10 February, 2023) observed that much of the wetlands around the world had been lost since the year 1700. It was feared that as much as 50 percent of wetlands might have been wiped out globally.
The latest research, moreover, suggests that the figure may actually be closer to 21 percent, an area the size of India. Few countries have seen much higher losses, with Ireland losing more than 90 percent of its wetlands. The main reason for these global losses has been the drainage of wetlands for growing crops, the report stated. The researchers used historical records and the latest maps to monitor the land use changes on a global scale.
Around half of the wetlands in Europe have gone, with the United Kingdom losing 75 percent of its original area. The United States, Central Asia, India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia are reported to have lost 50 percent of their original wetlands. It is these regional differences which promoted the idea that half of all the world’s wetlands had disappeared, Christian asserted.
Observing that the United Nations had recently pointed out that an estimated 40 percent of Earth’s species live and breed in wetlands and that a billion people depend on them for their livelihoods, Christian re-emphasized that conserving and restoring these vital habitats is key to achieving sustainable future for all living beings on Earth.
Jane Madgwick, Chief Executive Officer of Wetlands International, reflecting on this crucial issue observed that at the COP15 United Nations nature talks in Montreal during December 2022, the world community saw a leap towards the effective conservation and restoration of wetlands across the globe. Inland water and coastal ecosystems were included into the text of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) as was agreed by around 195 countries to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the target year 2030, which incidentally is just six years down the line.
One of the key targets of the GBF is to achieve the restoration of 30 percent of degraded ecosystems by 2030. For inland water ecosystems, Wetlands International and its partners has calculated that this would involve restoring a minimum of 350 million hectares of inland water and coastal wetlands, and 300,000 kilometers of rivers globally, Madgwick said.
The International Universities Climate Alliance (IUCA) and the UN-Water Expert Group on Water and Climate Change recently published a study, ‘Water for Climate Mitigation: Estimating the Global Freshwater Requirements of Climate Mitigation Measures’, estimating the water requirement for climate change mitigation measures.
Water is critical to climate change mitigation measures whose ‘water efficiency’ varies widely, with some requiring more freshwater than is now committed, and there is a need for sustainable, affordable, and scalable water solutions for climate change mitigation, the study stated.
Wetlands International had spearheaded the global campaign for restoration of inland freshwater as key to biodiversity recovery and largely to meet the climate goals in limiting global temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century. This urgency resulted from the ground-rooted assessment that much of the Earth’s freshwater had considerably reduced with significant loss in water bodies due to various reasons of which human interference is all too evident.
The current ground-based observation in Manipur State underlines the global concern on wetlands loss from anthropogenic interventions and other factors. As in the case of the Little Prespa Lake situation, many of the water bodies in the central Manipur valley had been drained for agriculture and converted to aquaculture ponds by fragmenting the degraded water bodies.
In the absence of a regulated water policy, much of the wetlands in the State are headed towards slow deaths as humans push for commercial gains without the least concern for the loss in biological diversity that the wetlands support or the possible fallouts contributing to climate change locally in the global context.
In current climate change deliberations, wetlands are seen as vital in climate mitigation measures specifically for the significant role of wetlands in carbon sequestration. Carbon storage in soil, as assessed in peatlands, is said to be much more significant than carbon stored in soil in tropical rainforests.
The sad story of the Little Prespa Lake, as much as a similar story with Lampha Pat and Porompat wetlands in Manipur, reminds people of consequences far removed from the people’s minds and thinking on the implications of climate change even as the world is beginning to see and feel the impact of extreme weather events without break in these past two to three years locally and globally.