ADB approves ₱50 million grant to scale up wetland management in the PH

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a technical assistance grant worth $1 million (₱50.18 million) to scale up the country’s wetland management and help maintain a healthy ecosystem in the region.

Other beneficiaries of the grant include Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, China, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The grant comes from ADB’s Regional Cooperation and Integration Fund and Technical Assistance Special Fund and aims to scale up the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) Initiative.

The partnership was established in 2006 and aims to protect migratory waterbirds, their habitats, and the livelihoods of people dependent upon them.

The EAAF is the most vulnerable of the eight major migratory flyways and covers East and Southeast Asia and Australasia, extending across 22 countries from the Arctic Circle to New Zealand.

Furthermore, it is home to thousands of wetlands that support over 50 million migratory waterbirds from more than 210 species, 20% of which are endangered.

“The wetlands that make up the EAAF provide food, medicine, fuel, income, and other benefits for nearly 200 million people in the Asia-Pacific region as well as maintaining essential ecosystem services such as flood regulation and carbon sequestration,” said the ADB.

However, degradation of coastal and inland wetlands persists largely due to continued land conversion and drainage for agriculture.

ADB’s latest intervention seeks to strengthen institutional capacity, identify and create investment proposals for priority sites, and develop a financing mechanism to support the EAAF in the long run by establishing a framework to identify sites of highest priority within the EAAF, then engage with participating countries to strengthen the protection and sustainable use of these sites. It will also establish a financing system to generate resources from EAAF partnership members and donor countries to support the sites’ long-term maintenance.

On the whole, the grant aims to bolster the protection and sustainable use of a network of wetland sites in the EAAF and support environmentally sustainable and inclusive economic growth, as well as regional integration.

SOURCE: Phil Star