Water Lands: picturing the world’s wetlands and their peoples

Thousands of fishers once spent much of the year camped on India’s Lake Loktak, harvesting its produce using traditional techniques. But the lake’s ecological balance has been lost due to an upstream dam, and the government has now banned people from living there. (Image © Peter Adams/Getty Images)

Two men paddle through New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The flooding was made much more severe by the destruction of the wetlands of the Mississippi river delta, that would otherwise have absorbed much of the seawater that surged into the city. (Image © Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The picturesque backwaters of Kerala, southern India, have become clogged with invasive water hyacinth from South America. This has followed the draining of marshes that also raise the risk of floods during heavy monsoon rains, as happened in 2018. (Image © Fred Pearce/Wetlands International)

A Landsat satellite image of the Venice lagoon taken in 2013. Rising tides, dredging, land reclamation and the diversion of rivers have turned the sleepy lagoon into an ocean bay, putting the “floating city” in danger of being engulfed. (Image: NASA)

Tourists and residents regularly have to escape flooding across the low-lying parts of Venice. In the floods of 2019, over 85% of the city was inundated and two people died. (Image © Stefano Mazzola/Awakening/Getty Images)

The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean blasted the shore of the Indonesian province of Aceh. The damage and loss of life was made worse by the removal of coastal mangroves to make room for fish ponds. Here, the people of Aceh’s Alue Naga village plant mangrove seedlings to buffer future floods and revive local fisheries. (Image © Abdul Hadi Firsawan/Pacific Press/Alamy)

Seafood for sale at a market in the Chinese city of Dalian on the shores of the Bohai Sea. Much of the mudflats along the Bohai coast have been reclaimed for industrial and agricultural purposes, and the 2010 Dalian oil spill severely damaged the ecosystem. (Image © Arthur J D/Greenpeace)

When given the chance wildlife still thrives in the Everglades wetland, which includes the largest freshwater marsh in the US. This eastern diamondback rattlesnake is endemic to the region. By the year 2000, the Everglades had been reduced to less than half its former size. Billions have since been spent on restoration efforts. (Image © Chris Johns/NG Image Collection)

The boggy Ruoergai grassland in Sichuan province on the Tibetan plateau was drained in the Mao era. Those drains are now being blocked, with promising results for biodiversity and the flow of China’s two most important rivers. Both the Yangtze and Yellow rivers are fed by the grassland; in the dry season, 45% of the water in the upper reaches of the Yellow river comes from the grassland’s peat. (Image © Dong Lei/naturepl.com)

The Rufiji, running through Tanzania, is Africa’s sixth largest river. Its varying flows and constant supply of silt maintain the mangrove swamps of its delta, on the shore of the Indian ocean. But a dam under construction upstream threatens to disrupt the delicate hydrology and undermine the delta’s fertility. (Image © Michael Poliza/NG Image Collection)

Vast swathes of Russia’s peat bogs were drained and excavated in the Soviet era to feed power stations. Abandoned after the collapse of Communism, the dry peat was particularly vulnerable to wildfires. In 2010, a record heatwave sparked peat fires across the country. Moscow experienced dangerous levels of air pollution. Now, rewetting programmes, such as those in Meschera national park near the capital, are taking off. Meschera has become a jewel of biodiversity, with pine and birch trees on the higher ground, and oak, willow and black alder in the boggier places. (Image © Alexandra Mudrats/ITAR-TASS/Alamy)

The world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal, is a home to the most water-loving big cat, the jaguar. Straddling Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, this vast and remote land of muddy water flows, lakes and seasonally flooded grasslands, is interspersed with forest islands and salt pans. (Image © Rafael Hoogesteijn/Panthera Brasil)