Abstract
Building bridges between environmental and political agendas is essential nowadays in face of the increasing human pressure on natural environments, including wetlands. Wetlands provide critical ecosystem services for humanity and can generate a considerable direct or indirect income to the local communities. To meet many of the sustainable development goals, we need to move our trajectory from the current environmental destructive development to a wiser wetland use. The current article contain a proposed agenda for the Pantanal aiming the improvement of public policy for conservation in the Pantanal, one of the largest, most diverse, and continuous inland wetland in the world. We suggest and discuss a list of 11 essential interfaces between science, policy, and development in region linked to the proposed agenda. We believe that a functional science network can booster the collaborative capability to generate creative ideas and solutions to address the big challenges faced by the Pantanal wetland.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Tropical Conservation Science |
Volume | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
A fundamental question is how to balance economic activities with biodiversity conservation and maintenance of ecosystem services. Several approaches have been developed by collaborative research networks, research projects, and conservation initiatives. Among these approaches, we may include the Fazenda Pantaneira Sustentável and its component Fazenda Pantaneira Biodiversa, which are diagnostic systems based on indicators developed by Embrapa Pantanal and its collaborators (; Tomas et al., in press). The Fazenda Pantaneira Sustentável system may be a suitable tool in certification schemes, aiming sustainability, value aggregation, and marketing purposes and is linked to Point 9 of our proposed agenda for the Pantanal. Other examples, such as the initiative of Instituto Homem Pantaneiro aiming the recovery and conservation of headwaters of the Upper Paraguay River Basin, the Wetlands International Blue Corridor Programme (“Corredor Azul”), and the PaCha (Pantanal-Chaco) Initiative supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, coordinated by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-NL) and IUCN-NL, and implemented by seven civil society organizations in Bolivia (4) and Paraguay (3), have potential positive impacts as their approach goes beyond local scale and involve several aspects of conservation. The authors thank SOS Pantanal, UFMS, Embrapa Pantanal, and Smithsonian Institution for the organization of the workshop “Developing a Pantanal Conservation Network—Identifying Conservation Priorities for the Pantanal,” held in Campo Grande, MS, Brazil, in August 8, 2018. During the workshop, this article was set a first follow-up step on organizing a research network in the Pantanal. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was financially supported by Alexandre Bossi.
Keywords
- Pantanal
- biodiversity
- development
- education
- sustainability
- wetlands