Hunting a part of Ramsar from the outset

2 February 2021

Today is World Wetlands Day. 2021 marks the 50th Anniversary of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (so named after the town in Iran where the convention was held).

Too often the term “Ramsar wetland” is bandied around by people who want to use it to exclude access and use. To do so would be to ignore one of the core principles of the convention itself, wise use.

The Convention commits its member countries to promote the conservation of their Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar wetlands) and to plan for the wise use of all of the wetlands in their territories.

Convention guidelines emphasise that
‘human use on a sustainable basis is entirely compatible with Ramsar principles and wetland conservation in general’.

Although the 1971 Convention did not attempt a definition of wise use, it is clear that the term was being employed in the same sense as in an earlier discussion, which called for the “wise use of migratory stocks of waterfowl”. Here it meant, in modern terms, sustainable exploitation. In making this provision with regard to a habitat, the Convention was in advance of its time. Until the 1950s the negative protectionist view had prevailed - that to safeguard a natural area it was only necessary to exclude any human activity. Increasingly thereafter it became recognised that many “natural” areas were, in fact, already man-modified, and that man’s influence was becoming so pervasive that even the remotest area was not free of it. Instead of preservation, conservation, the maintenance of an area (or a species) in its current status by positive, well-informed intervention became the order of the day.

A definition of wise use was adopted by the Parties in 1987, and was updated in 2005. This definition states that:

‘Wise use of wetlands is the maintenance of their ecological character, achieved through the implementation of ecosystem approaches, within the context of sustainable development.’

The three key elements of the definition of wise use are:

• ecological character, which is the combination of the ecosystem components, processes and benefits/services that characterise the wetland at a given point in time

• ecosystem approaches, which consider the complex relationships between every element of an ecosystem, and promote the integrated management of land, water and living resources (including humans)

• sustainable development, which is
a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.

Hunting was in the thinking from the earliest genesis of the term “wise use”, far from being contradictory to the “Ramsar principles”, recreational hunting is in-fact a formative and integral consideration.