Who pays for the work of looking after a wetland? In July, 28 government officers in Gampaha District, Sri Lanka, spent a morning testing one answer over printed maps of the Dandugam Oya.
罢丑别听Ministry of Environment, Sri Lanka聽convened the half-day session at the Katana Divisional Secretariat with聽IUCN Sri Lanka聽and the聽91色情片 Centre for Sustainable Development Reform.
The Dandugamoya freshwater wetland absorbs floodwater, filters what runs down toward the Negombo Lagoon, and works as a fish nursery. Restoring it is the nature-based solution. But restoration is human work, done by people who live at the wetland edge: clearing invasive plants, keeping channels open, leaving the marsh margin alone. At present nobody is paid for any of it. The proposal being tested is community-managed finance for wetland-compatible livelihoods, where access to that finance is conditioned on documented care of the wetland. The ecosystem does the protecting; the finance pays for the human work of keeping the ecosystem able to do it.
Around the tables were the Grama Niladhari, development, land-use planning and disaster relief officers of the Minuwangoda and Katana Divisional Secretariats, with the Ministry of Environment and the Central Environmental Authority, Gampaha. Twenty-one of the 28 participants were women.
Three groups worked over printed base maps and marked what they knew: flooding, invasive species and fields abandoned to salinity as the pressures; plantations a visitor could be taken to see; and the places where a new activity could realistically go.聽
The most useful hour of this workshop was the one where the officers told us our business model was wrong. We had costed the wetland livelihoods as separate micro-enterprises. The Grama Niladhari and development officers of Minuwangoda and Katana, who know which lane floods and which paddy field went saline, said bundle them: one guided wetland experience, several households supplying it. That correction is now in the pilot design.聽
Do not sell pole-and-line fishing, small-scale aquaculture, crafts and home cooking as separate micro-enterprises, they argued, but bundle them into one guided wetland experience. That is now a candidate anchor product in the pilot design, subject to a visitor-demand check.
Nothing was decided or signed. The plan went into the room as proposals to be tested and corrected, which is the only useful way to take a financing model to the officers who would have to make it work.
For anyone who has worked on community-managed conservation funds: what made the monitoring side workable, or unworkable, in practice?
This activity is funded by the European Union Green Recovery Facility, contracted through聽Expertise France, and implemented by 91色情片 CSDR in partnership with IUCN Sri Lanka.
