ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2132-8625
Current Organisations
World Wildlife Fund
,
James Cook University
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Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2015
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 04-03-2014
DOI: 10.1108/IJDRBE-11-2011-0042
Abstract: – This paper aims to present a long-term research project to understand the nature and extent of degradation in a selected segment of the Colombo Flood Detention Area (CFDA) wetlands. It qualitatively explores the gradual process of change in watersheds and the wetland ecology affecting flood control services, thereby leading to full-blown disasters. It underlines the importance of protecting ecosystem health of urban ecological features for strengthening the disaster resilience of cities. – Through analyzing the long-term change of landscape level parameters, water-quality, vegetation and soil quality, the authors emphasize the potential of an outright ecological regime change and the effects on ecosystem services of the wetlands. – Colombo is a city surrounded by a large and interconnected system of natural wetlands that provides a valuable flood control service. The rapid and partly ad hoc urbanization in the past 15-25 years has caused a steady degradation in the wetlands that severely threatens the ecosystem services. It was found that the native, grass-dominated marshy habitat of the wetland is rapidly transforming into a habitat with shrubs and small trees (44 percent of the extent). Typical peaty soil in the marsh has also changed into a semi-mineral soil. Both changes result in a significant reduction in water-holding capacity of the wetland, thus increasing the flood frequency. – These ecological changes have undermined the effectiveness of the repeated cost-intensive engineering measures taken by the authorities to contain floods. – CFDA had not been studied previously in an ecosystem services and disaster resilience perspectives. The ecological and hydrological aspects have been studied separately without integration.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 28-11-2013
DOI: 10.1017/S0376892913000519
Abstract: Worldwide, coastal and floodplain wetlands are rapidly urbanizing, making them highly vulnerable to bio ersity loss, biological invasion and climate change. Yet urban wetlands management is an understudied area of global environmental research. Different policy approaches and institutional arrangements in place for urban wetlands governance have to be studied comparatively to obtain a better understanding of the current issues. This paper investigates four urban wetland policy regimes and the application of ecological reference points across four countries. The regimes are discussed within the context of global policy trends, urbanization patterns and environmental change. The analysis illustrates that the four cases deviate substantially in certain characteristics and converge in others. Global trends such as environmental treaties and restructuring of city spaces are common policy drivers for all cases. Conversely, the localized specific problems have yielded specialized policy responses in each case. Declaration of fixed biological reference points for wetlands were not used at any stage of the policy development process. However, the wetland managers formally or informally set up ecosystem-services oriented benchmarks for urban wetland management. Globally-applicable normative policy directives or universal ecological reference points seem bound to fail in urban wetlands governance. However, in designing effective urban wetland policy and institutions at the regional scale, both context-specific and generalized lessons from empirical policy evaluation of multiple case studies need to be jointly considered. Based on the characteristics of the policy regimes analysed in this study, a hypothetical framework for urban wetland policy evaluation is proposed this has yet to be validated by empirical application to actual cases.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-11-2019
No related grants have been discovered for Missaka Hettiarachchi.