Sardinia -- As the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, Sardinia has such a variety of landscapes that an age-old adage likens it to a continent, most of them are pristine, some are wetlands.

  The island is home to nine Ramsar-listed wetlands, six of them strewn along the Gulf of Oristano, a gaping open indentation facing westwards easily seen in satellite pictures. Altogether covering some 7,700 hectares (ca. 19,000 acres), they include the whole palette: bogs, marshes, swamps, salt-lakes, lagoons, ponds, rivers, estuaries, creeks and rice paddies in a patchwork that provides habitat to a diverse plant life and haven to migratory birds.

  For decades wetlands were sites of draining and land reclaiming projects as they were breeding ground for malaria-spreading mosquitoes. The paradigm shifted in 1974, when the Ramsar Convention was adopted. A list of wetlands worthy of conservation across the world was drawn. Lawmakers had eventually recognised the importance of wetlands “as a lifeline for biological diversity which, in turn, brings about benefits for human life”. The problem is, it is non-binding.  

  “The Ramsar Convention was visionary in that it clearly exhorted to use environmentally precious territories wisely for their biological diversity and for providing pristine habitat to migratory birds. In essence, it clearly spelt out the idea of environmental sustainability before this gained centre stage in the fight against climate change” says Giorgio Pinna, ornithologist and representative for Oristano and its environs of the Italian League for the Protection of Birds, LIPU.

  Mauro Fois, a botanist at the University of Cagliari, the capital city of the island, carried out a survey of the whole of Sardinia by crossing satellite pictures with field observations. He counted 2,567 coastal and inland wetlands. “Demanding the majority of these be granted protected area status is pretentious and, frankly, unviable” he says. “Wetlands are useful for communities, for their human activities, and this must be recognised,” he adds. “However, the right balance must be struck between human needs and nature conservation.” he concludes. 

  Inlaid amongst the wetlands encircling the Gulf of Oristano are ten small villages and one town. They are surrounded by a hotchpotch of fields: artichoke, maise and tomato fields with olive groves, vineyards and a few pasture lands in amongst them. There, farming and fishing are small to medium-scale. But Sardinia has been inhabited for thousands of years and, as a result, it is a shrine of time-honoured regional and entrenched local traditions, some of them dating back to pre-history. This resulted in the development of distinct, and rather parochial, strategies for managing the wetlands in each municipality. For that precise reason, the pressure piled on local administrations by the Ramsar Convention and the spate of Directives the European Union issued hot on its heels petered out as it was fragmented by territorial boundaries, marred by petty disagreements or stultified by bureaucracy.

   Giorgio Pinna decries the Sardinian local administrations’ lacklustre reaction to the international push towards a greater protection for the wetlands: “there was a dearth of expertise and, paradoxically, plans were hatched that turned the priorities topsy-turvy: building and infrastructure came first, not conservation. Engineers and draughtsmen were taken on board, not biologists, ornithologists or any other scientists. The approach was completely wrong.”.

  Worldwide, wetlands are not faring well. They are deteriorating or being lost to human encroachment at the tune of 0.78 per cent yearly, faster than deforestation.

  But today, it is a given that they are crucial for mitigating the effects of global warming. This is primarily due to their carbon storage capacity. They also make coastlines more resilient to extreme weather events and, significantly, replenish and stabilise underground aquifers.

  Enter Luc Hoffmann, born in Basel in 1923, grandson of Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, founder of the eponymous pharmaceutical company in 1896. Ornithologist, conservationist and philanthropist, he co-founded the World Wildlife Fund and was a primary actor in the drafting of the Ramsar Convention.  With his MAVA Foundation he intended to hand out his wealth to nature conservation projects around the Mediterranean, West Africa and the Alps until his one hundredth birthday. Having travelled far and wide across Mediterranean countries, and visited the wetlands encircling the Gulf of Oristano, he crossed paths with the Medsea Foundation. Headquartered in Cagliari, this is an international organisation devoted to finding solutions for protecting, conserving and managing sustainably the coastal habitats in the Mediterranean Sea. And a radical approach towards managing effectively the wetlands on the Gulf of Oristano was devised.

   “The only way the tables could turn was by working on developing a framework for concerted efforts centred on social awareness of this shared resource: the wetlands.” says Giulia Eremita, chief communication officer at Medsea. “That was the only weapon at our disposal for leading the communities to agree first to a set of guidelines to be complied with consistently, then to projects to be planned, in a bid to prioritise the wetlands and their conservation. Significantly, we also kept in mind their role as a boon for economic growth”. Eremita adds. Therefore, communities took centre stage. 

  “The strategy we adopted was simple and effective: liaising directly with the local population of the town and villages in the area, instead of waiting for politicians to act first for the conservation of the wetlands. We could call it a bottom-up participatory approach. We liaised first with the local communities, then enterprises, institutions and administrations who became aware of their shared needs. When the time was ripe, we all drew a list of actions to undertake in order of priority. The younger generations were key, but farmers and fishermen did not run away from us.” Eremita concludes. More than 40 public meetings were convened and the results came thick and fast. A covenant of intentions was undersigned by the mayors of the 11 municipalities in whose lands the wetlands belong. In effect, the wetlands became just the one entity to be managed according to the same set of principles. 

  For starters, “just off the Northern sweep of the Gulf of Oristano, landowners relinquished fields encircling the Pond of Sal’e Porcus, which morphs into a salt-lake in summer. They were not productive, owing to their high salt content, but now form a veritable buffer zone, where 12,000 sharp rush and sea rush plantlets were planted. In the process, people were led to rediscover the value of a centuries-old tradition: making wickerwork artefacts, namely the whole gamut, from baskets and sieves to trinkets, using the rushes picked from around the pond.” says Luca Foschi, of the Medsea Foundation, as he takes tentative squelching steps on the tacky clay near the shore, amid flamingo and crane calls. 

  In the village of San Vero Milis, hard by, a wickerwork museum was created in a bid to set the scene for promoting these artefacts in Italy and further afield.

  As for farmers, they resolved to minimise both the exposure of the wetlands to pollution from agriculture chemicals and the water consumption for a smaller impact on the underground aquifer that the wetlands continually replenish. In order to do so, they quickly embraced precision agriculture. “We mainly work with rice and maize producers” says Andrea Liverani, who is getting ready for a business trip to Los Angeles. He is co-founder of Smart Geosurvey, a company based in Sardinia with a fleet of drones fitted with multispectral cameras. They have numerous clients around these wetlands. “We survey the fields by flying our drones along overlapping strips of land. We then determine the health of the plants in the fields by gauging their photosynthetic activity. Eventually, thanks to proprietary software that we ourselves designed, we map the fields by categorising the plants growing in them into six groups based on their health. Our client will then administer chemicals and water, the latter all the more precious in a land so prone to heatwaves and droughts, precisely in the dosages each plant needs, with no chance of either wasting or misusing them.”

  “We use precision agriculture for our rice paddies.” says Francesca Mattana, public outreach officer at Ferrari Rice, a local rice producer. “Drones are flown ten days after sowing, then every fortnight. It takes two hours to map one hundred hectares of rice paddies.” 

   And state of the art technology will also be useful for monitoring the effects of climate change on these precious wetlands. As part of an international research effort coordinated by the Medsea Foundation, a network of sensors is about to be positioned in the St. John’s Lagoon, located close to the Southern tip of the Gulf of Oristano. It is one of six pilot sites in Europe, the Levant and North Africa. This is at risk of flooding, with potential detrimental effects for vegetation and fish in the long term, and dire consequences for the local communities who have been relying on it for their livelihoods for centuries. The sensors will measure changes in the sea level, temperature and turbidity when flooding events unfold to understand what happens to the ecosystems as a result. Furthermore, at its very inlet, plans are afoot to position a gate designed to be raised when necessary, thereby stopping seawater from entering into the lagoon and keeping the salt content in it at tolerable levels for its biological diversity, in particular its fish stock.

   But it is the circular economy, a central tenet of sustainability, that fishermen have embraced with abandon. In a nutshell, “we give back to nature what we take out of it”, they say at a fishery cooperative established by a huddle of fishermen in 1965 and operating in the Southern lagoons of the Gulf. While mainly concentrating on mussel farming, they also farm gilt-head breams in a canal-shaped water basin adjacent to the Corru Mannu Lagoon, not far from St. John’s. These are fed mussels with dented shells which do not make the cut for the sale. By nibbling at the soft parts, the fish clean the shells so well that they leave them ready for immediate disposal. 

  And for the members of this fishery cooperative, waste disposal marks the starting point of a new manufacturing process: Mussel shells are crushed and mixed with sand, cement, water, few plastic chips and waste from a marble quarry. An environmentally friendly material is obtained, which is suitable for manufacturing benches and other swanky street furniture. While being a highlight at the Milan Design Week last year, one such bench, on their premises has pride of place for those waiting for the start of their guided tours around the fishery.

   A few yards from there the idea of circular economy is taken to the next level. In fact, at the centre of the lagoon is an islet entirely made of mussel shells filling 2,000 jute bags wrapped around by a shore obtained from crushed mussel shells. They were put in place by two divers supported by a small barge. Some sixty-five feet in length, twenty-three in width and twenty in height, but only over one foot above the water, it has slowly become nesting ground for a variety of birds. Little terns, common terns, sandwich terns, seagulls and black-winged stilts were sighted. No wonder why it is making headlines around the world.

  Amid these developments, the idea of creating a national park is sometimes mooted, and institutional stakeholders say they are ready for it. Regardless, these wetlands will stand out as a paragon of how communities can be talked into conjuring up a new vision centred on respecting and caring for the environment.

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