Preserving and protecting wetlands requires more than just vague assent, while draining and destruction continues: we need to recognise their high value, as wetlands, and then protect them as they preserve us.
As President Mnangagwa stressed yesterday in his statement to mark World Wetlands Day, we need to be active in protection and restoration of wetlands to make sure all the benefits they bring not only are present for our own times, but for future generations.
This year Zimbabwe has the honour of hosting the 15th Conference of Parties who have signed up to the Treaty on the Conservation of Wetlands, signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran.
And it would be useful if we could show that we have been following the Presidential lead in doing something constructive, rather than trying to destroy what we have.
Harare City Council has been among the most destructive over the last quarter century, allowing developers and favourites to continue encroaching on wetlands, destroying the extremely limited public open space in the city and making sure that we will be inhabiting a dry concrete desert in a few years time.
Wetlands have been sold off, sometimes for a song in these days of probable corruption, often to people with strong connections to the Harare City Council. Most of the major streams and rivers in the city are fast becoming just a drainage ditch between blocks of buildings, and even then the pressure is on keeping the drainage ditch clear so the water flows even more quickly out of the city.
We have been seeing falling water tables in the city for decades, but now it is falling far faster and even deep boreholes are running dry along with those, on the edge of former wetlands, that everyone thought would be able to pump water forever.
One of the prime functions of wetlands in Zimbabwe's urban areas is to recharge the aquifers. Rainfall needs to seep through the soil to do this, and when almost all rain falls on streets, roofs, parking areas and other slabs of concrete it will simply be runoff and in a few hours be flowing out of the city.
When it can stick around, sitting in a wetland, what we used to call vleis and even swamps, a lot is able to soak into the ground and is cleaned up before soaking in or before the sluggish stream eventually moves the surplus out of the city into our supply dams, that can really use inflows of clean water.
A second major function is to provide the recreational land we need. It would be wrong or at least not best value for money, we agree, to allocate prime building land to public open spaces and parks. But as wetlands need major drainage works before they can be built on, and in any case often comprise thick organic clay soils that are dubious for building without expensive additional engineering, it seems obvious to put the wetlands to dual use, as wetlands, but also as open space and the future parks.
In some suburbs, we already see residents faced with a growing number of cluster housing developments and other densification and commercial building seeing the need to preserve what is still there, often the wetlands.
So that is why at the beginning of the rainy season there were people planting trees on the edges of their local wetland, so they would have the beginnings of a decent park in their area in a couple of decades.
The dual use has been around for some time. There are several schools built in the 1960s and 1970s, when land was getting scarcer, that have their buildings on the good building land near the edge of a wetland and their sports fields on the wetter land further down a slope. Most of the public golf courses after the first one, which was built on almost limitless land on the edge of the city, are laid out on wetlands because this was where suitable land was available, and such a policy also made sure there were natural water hazards.
The one major private golf course developed in recent years is also on a wetland in Borrowdale and amidst the surrounding cluster housing preserves water sources and a decent stream and provides a swathe of green through the concrete. Some complain that there is no money to protect wetlands and open space today. But a lot of wetland can be protected by simply not being used, and in later years, as Zimbabwe becomes a richer country, it is then still there and can be upgraded, as a wetland.
Over time fences can be erected, trees planted and generally the sort of parks a decent city really needs are gradually made up.
All great cities have parks and open space that allow them to breathe. In many European cities these are the old royal hunting parks, that developers were kept out of until there was a general feeling that they needed to be transferred to the people. In other cases, "useless land" was preserved and became a focal point.
Even in the early days of colonial Harare, the then parks officer managed to grab the wet area around three springs near the city centre, plant a few hundred trees and create Harare Gardens, which admittedly needs quite a lot of work to restore its glory, but is still there to be restored as money becomes available. Councils have nibbled at it over the years, and that needs to stop.
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In rural areas, wetlands are sometimes under threat from those wanting to drain and plant a few crops before they dry up.
Again they need to be preserved forever.
Of course, we think hay can be mowed and other non-destructive uses, but they are needed to ensure that the streams keep flowing and that all those boreholes now being drilled will still be pumping water in 100 years and longer.
It does not rain for much beyond four months of the year these days, and that water needs to be around for the rest of the year and the bad years. Wetlands store a lot on the surface and underground, and even keep the rain that falls in January around long enough to be useful rather than just seeing it flow rapidly into a giant river.
The point is, in Zimbabwe, preserving wetlands is not just some sort of "do-gooder" activity, but is an active way of fighting the effects of climate change in town and country, provide the green lungs our towns and cities need, provide the emergency grazing that farmers require in the bad times, and generally pay for themselves many times over.
And they do not cost much to preserve, just being allowed to stay there in effect.
