“Paradox. Why, if wetlands are so valuable in their natural state, are they being eliminated at such a rapid rate? The answer to this paradox is that although wetlands serve society in multiple ways, the nature of wetland benefits are such that the owners of wetlands usually cannot capture the benefits for their own use or sale. The flood protection benefits accrue to others downstream. The fish and wildlife that breed and inhabit the wetlands migrate, and are captured or enjoyed by others. The ground water recharge and sediment trapping benefits cannot be commercially exploited. For the owner of a wetland to benefit from his resource, he often has to alter it, convert it, and develop it. That is why, despite their value, wetlands are being eliminated. . . .”
—A Guide to Living With
Florida’s Wetlands, 20131
Today, it is no secret that swamps store water. In the United States, millions of acres have been set aside in the Everglades for just that purpose. But in much of Africa, because surface water has become difficult to find and irrigation needs have skyrocketed, swamps are being drained, thereby destroying wetland systems that are more useful and valuable than even the much-touted rainforest. Wetlands tend to hold back water and recharge water levels in the soil when needed. Africa’s water resources have been decreasing as a result of persistent droughts and land-use patterns, and the situation is bound to get worse. Now climate change caused by the major developing and developed nations will magnify these effects. Unfortunately, Sub-Saharan Africa will suffer more than any other part of the world, even though its contribution to global emissions is small.
The wake-up call comes to us in the form of a UN report summarized in a UNEP-GRID press release that warns of the looming future of the African continent. The details are not hard to grasp. The population of Africa is expected to rise from 770 million to 1.75 billion by 2050. By coincidence, the oil resources of the world will peak in that same year, and a food crisis is predicted that will dwarf the most recent one resulting from the last drought in 2012, the warmest year on record, which plunged 100 million people into poverty and hunger.
By 2050, rainfall patterns in Africa will shift. The UN predicts that global warming will cause clouds to concentrate in the central region of the continent, where flooding and massive soil erosion will be the norm along with an increase in water-borne diseases like malaria. Paradoxically, the dry regions of Africa will increase by a whopping 29%. In the driest parts of the continent—the north, west, east, and parts of the south—river flow will decrease, available hydropower will decline, and wetlands will disappear.
In the United States, we are just realizing the importance of wetlands in filtering pollution and flood control. The benefits of wetlands, including papyrus swamps, to the world’s ecosystems are enormous.
• Robert Costanza, Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont, estimates that the economic value of flood prevention and other ecological services provided by wetlands is $37,000 per acre per year. This is a sum far greater than any other ecosystem—seven times higher than that of the next most valuable system, tropical rainforest.
• Wetlands hold 10–20% of the world’s carbon, an amount comparable to the carbon content of today’s atmosphere.
• Draining tropical swamps releases 100 tons of carbon per acre.
• As pointed out by Michael Grunwald in his bestseller The Swamp, it is far easier and cheaper to maintain wetlands than to drain them and then later try to rebuild them once the detrimental effects of that drainage has been wrought.
Despite these benefits, 60% of global wetlands have been destroyed in the past one hundred years; 90% of Europe’s wetlands are gone, while 90% of Malaysia’s freshwater swamps have been drained for rice. In some parts of East Africa, 50–80% of the papyrus swamps have already disappeared, replaced by cultivation. In Africa, the papyrus swamp is one of the last walls of defense against these changes.
Papyrus is still found at the headwaters of many of the major rivers in Africa, where it protects and nurtures. Years ago it disappeared from Egypt; now it is gone from Lake Chad and many places in West Africa. With the exception of the papyrus growing around the headwaters of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, papyrus has virtually disappeared from Africa north of the 10th parallel. From 30°N to 10°N, a matter of 1,000 miles, it is gone. The large papyrus swamp in the Sudd is the last bastion, a swamp that is in danger of being drained to provide water for irrigation. Papyrus swamps may yet hold the key to stability in some of the most unstable regions of our planet. For as water becomes a scarcer and scarcer resource, protecting what is available will be key to preventing chaos. The need to restore and preserve what is left is imminent.
In the next to the last scenes of the movie “The Last King of Scotland,” the plane carrying a badly wounded young Dr. Garrigan takes off from Entebbe and banks out over Lake Victoria as it turns and heads for home. In the movie commentary, the director Kevin MacDonald calls the lake the “symbol of Africa.” Down below, we see a wide shot of a large papyrus swamp on the edge of the lake. Surrounding the tarmac and out in the water of the lake are the same swamps that I saw on the first day I arrived in Africa.
The explosion has yet to happen. In Africa, an ecological time bomb is about to go off, with agricultural, domestic, and sewage pollution along the Nile and in the Central African Lakes. The infiltration of heavy metals from chemical fertilizer use in the delta of the Nile, and industrial pollution along the Zambezi and the Copperbelt, are killing the people, the land, and the water. One of the major flyways for millions of birds in the Rift Valley and the Sudd, the last major natural freshwater fisheries in the world are threatened.
The plant that helped ancient Egyptians grow, expand, and develop into a vibrant society is standing by, ready to help once again. We need to give this plant a chance.