World Wetlands Day 1999

“People and wetlands - The vital link” was the theme for the World Wetlands Day in 1999.

Twenty eight years after the signing of the Convention the WWD 1999 celebrated wetlands as habitats that have a special link with people. Not only with communities living in or around wetlands and benefiting directly from their resources, but also with human societies at large.

The link is there, because we all live by or near a wetland of some sort, since, inescapably, we all live near a source of water. The vital link is there, even though we may never have thought of it, or, even worse, if we may have actively neglected that strong link with wetlands and acquiesced in their drainage, transformation, contamination as dumping sites, permanent flooding by dam construction, siltation or pollution.