Global Wetland Governance: Introducing the Transboundary Wetlands Database

Abstract

The water governance discourse focuses on the use of water from rivers—and increasingly lakes and aquifers—for a variety of human uses, often in a competing manner. Largely missing from this discourse are wetlands. Despite an increased understanding of the benefits of wetlands, global wetland area continues to decrease. Particularly in international river basins, upstream water withdrawals are having negative impacts on wetlands, and the communities that rely on them downstream. Following the framework of transboundary water cooperation, the joint management of transboundary wetlands in the context of integrated basin management may prevent conflict and lead to further collaboration. As a first step to understand how wetlands may fit into water cooperation, this research employs spatial analysis and document analysis to identify transboundary wetlands and possible institutions to manage them, providing a basis for analyzing conflict and cooperation dynamics in them. The products of this research are a database and map of 300 transboundary wetlands, including the river basins (and, when applicable, the River Basin Organizations) they fall within.