Three years into an ambitious wetland restoration project in East Africa, conservationist Julie Mulonga says she’s learned the value of small steps. The Source to Sea project set out to protect wetlands in the Rift Valley and mangroves along the Indian Ocean coastline at the same time as strengthening livelihoods and climate resilience.
“We started with a big vision for the Source to Sea project,” says Mulonga, the East Africa director for Wetlands International, “but looking back, I think we might have aimed too big, too soon.”
Launched in 2021, the project covers two vast ecoregions: the Rift Valley Lakes ecoregion, stretching from Lake Albert and the Ethiopian Highlands in the north, to Lake Tanganyika in the south; and the East African Mangrove ecoregion, extending from southern Somalia to Mozambique, including the Lamu seascape in Kenya, the Rufiji Delta in Tanzania, and the Zambezi River Delta in Mozambique.
The key project sites are in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. These include biodiversity hotspots like Ethiopia’s Abijata-Shalla Lakes National Park, a critical stopover for migratory birds and a designated important bird area, and Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake. The Ziway Shalla and Omo-Turkana river basins where these sites are found have been severely degraded by a combination of deforestation, pollution, overexploitation of water and rangeland, and the growing impacts of climate change. This has resulted in water shortages and food insecurity for many of the millions of people who live in the region.
The project is implemented by Wetlands International, an NGO dedicated to conserving and restoring one of the most endangered freshwater habitat types. More than half of all wetlands globally have been lost since 1900 to agricultural expansion, natural resource extraction and urbanization.
The problem, says Mulonga, lies with the implementation of laws and policies. While governments have made commitments to things like the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which calls for the restoration of 30% of degraded inland water ecosystems and protection of 30% of inland water areas, these haven’t translated into sufficient action at the country level, she says.
Source to Sea represents a new approach for this region.
Mulonga says WI realized they had to work at a landscape scale. “It’s a different way of thinking for us,” she says. “We can no longer work on small sites. We need to look at what is happening upstream and downstream, and engage with all the actors within that landscape.”
The approach isn’t a new concept. Also referred to as integrated water resources management, this landscape-wide focus is transforming the organization’s strategy and workforce. To its existing strengths in assessing, managing and restoring wetland ecologies, WI is building up new capacity to understand and engage with the needs of communities and livelihoods.
The project initially didn’t go to plan. Assessing its own work in late 2021, WI noted difficulties, including underestimating the time needed to get government agencies, civil society and community groups on board, overambitious planning, and communication barriers with local community groups.
Mulonga says they soon learned to put the larger vision aside until they had gained people’s trust and addressed their immediate needs.