By Megan Eldred, Senior Policy Manager, Sites at BirdLife International
We are losing one of our most powerful natural allies against climate change, and yet we are barely paying attention.
As London Climate Action Week begins, the focus will rightly be on emissions. But adaptation, preparing for the impacts already unfolding, deserves equal urgency. Recent heatwaves in the UK are a clear warning. Meanwhile, one of our most effective tools for building resilience is being drained, degraded and overlooked: our wetlands.
Wetlands are not peripheral ecosystems. They are frontline climate infrastructure, and we are dismantling them at an alarming rate. Covering just 6% of the Earth’s land surface, they punch way above their weight, storing 20–35% of all land-based carbon. Peatlands alone hold more carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
Wetlands also underpin biodiversity and human wellbeing at a vast scale. Around 40% of plant and animal species live or breed in wetlands, yet roughly a quarter are at risk of extinction. These ecosystems filter water, buffer floods and storms, sustain fisheries, and support the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. Since 1970, the world has lost around 35% of its wetlands, a faster rate of loss than any other ecosystem.
This is not just a conservation issue. It is a climate imperative.
When wetlands are degraded or drained, they do not simply stop storing carbon; they start releasing it. Drained peatlands alone emit around 2 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, roughly 5% of global human-caused emissions.
Every hectare lost is a double blow: weakening a critical carbon sink while accelerating climate impacts that communities are already struggling to manage. We are eroding a life-support system we depend on.
The missing links in the sky
For migratory birds, the consequences are immediate and visible.
Each year, billions of birds travel vast distances along routes known as flyways, global aerial corridors linking continents. If flyways are bird super-highways, wetlands are the service stations that make these journeys possible.
A shorebird travelling from the Arctic to Australia may cover tens of thousands of kilometres, but it cannot do so without stopping. They depend on a chain of healthy wetlands to rest, feed and rebuild energy for the next leg.
Those links are breaking.
Climate change is intensifying droughts, shrinking wetlands that have persisted for millennia. At the same time, extreme rainfall can flood ecosystems so abruptly that it washes away the invertebrates birds depend on for food. Within a single season, a wetland can swing from parched to destructive flooding.
For migratory birds, finely tuned to stable conditions over thousands of years, this instability is devastating.
Take the Bar-tailed Godwit, which undertakes the longest known non-stop flight of any bird, travelling up to 12,000 kilometres from Alaska to New Zealand. To complete this journey, it must double its body weight by feeding in intertidal wetlands such as those in the Yellow Sea. If those habitats degrade, birds simply do not survive the journey.
Unlike resident species, migratory birds face threats across entire continents: breeding sites, wintering grounds, and every stop along the way. Climate change is also disrupting timing, with birds increasingly arriving too early or too late, missing peak food availability.
The result is stark: birds are starving on migration routes that once sustained them.
Solutions that work, when we invest in them
The good news is that we know how to fix this, and there is clear evidence that it works.
The Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper once faced rapid collapse due to habitat loss. But since 2019, the protection of 16 coastal sites in China and South Korea, covering more than 400,000 hectares, has helped slow its annual population decline from 26% to around 5%.
This shows that when wetlands are protected at scale, species can recover.
But protection alone is not enough. Wetlands must be restored, managed and conserved as connected networks across entire flyways: not isolated patches. This is the approach BirdLife International is advancing through its Global Flyways Programme and its Memorandum of Understanding with Wetlands International.
Achieving this requires governments, local communities and financial institutions to align around a shared understanding: wetland conservation is a climate adaptation investment. Protecting a floodplain upstream protects a city downstream. Restoring a tidal flat can shield coastal communities from storms. These are measurable benefits.
Yet wetlands remain largely absent from the climate finance flows needed to sustain them at scale.
There are signs of progress. BirdLife is working with partners including the World Bank, the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), and the Asian Development Bank to deliver large-scale wetland initiatives across the world’s four major flyways.
This week, BirdLife is hosting From Margins to Markets: Financing Wetland Resilience at Scale, bringing together voices from finance, conservation and the private sector to explore how to mobilise investment. On 11 September 2026, BirdLife International will convene its second Global Flyways Summit in Nairobi, uniting governments, scientists and conservation leaders. Wetlands will feature not as a niche issue, but as a central climate solution.
A choice we cannot ignore
The science is clear. The solutions are known. The cost of inaction is rising.
We can continue to drain wetlands, accelerate emissions, and leave hundreds of millions more exposed to floods, droughts and storms. Or we can recognise wetlands for what they are: some of the most effective and cost-efficient climate adaptation solutions on the planet.
This choice is already being made in policies, investments and land-use decisions worldwide.
If we get it right, future generations will still witness the return of migratory birds each year, from flamingos colouring East African lakes pink to ospreys arriving back in UK wetlands each spring.
If we get it wrong, those journeys will end.
Wetlands are not optional in the fight against climate change. They are the missing piece. It is time we treated them as such.
About BirdLife International
BirdLife International is the only global Partnership conserving birds and all life on our planet. We exist to give one voice to nature, and to unite and strengthen conservation across borders. We’re made up of over 120 worldwide conservation organisations and a Global Team. We work side by side, tackling some of the natural world’s most pressing issues. Together, we are the global authority on birds. Find out more at: http://www.birdlife.org/how-we-work
Megan Eldred bio
Megan Eldred leads BirdLife’s global sites policy across international environmental agreements and provides expert advice to BirdLife Partners to integrate critical sites and Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) into policy, drive emergency site protection, and champion nature-positive action and finance. She is an expert on wetland conservation, formerly managing the UK’s network of Wetlands of International Importance, and she currently advises the Convention on Biological Diversity’s ad-hoc scientific and technical advisory group on the implementation of the KMGBF.
