Restoring Chennai’s wetlands by investing in nature

Boosting natural resources as green infrastructure is the motto

Environmental experts from The Nature Conservancy spoke about saving Chennai’s remaining wetlands by investing in them, in a talk hosted by Chennai International Centre. The organisation’s CEO Mark Tercek said that the 65-year-old firm was looking to invest in Chennai’s wetlands by bringing in a business-like approach to conservation whereby they would seek to promote these natural resources as green infrastructure and thus get a buy-in from both government and local communities to invest in its upkeep.

Citing an example of a similar approach they had adopted elsewhere, Mr. Tercek said that often proposing an economic argument was more convincing than pushing for an environmental argument to influence government or corporate decisions in favour of saving nature.

Experience elsewhere

“In Quito, Ecuador, we approached a water company that was planning to put up grey infrastructure to clean up polluted water and told them that saving and conserving the watershed of the waterbodies would cost less and fetch better results instead. The company was convinced and worked on restoring the waterbodies instead with philanthropic funding from our side. It is now a successful model of our approach to conservation.”

In Chennai, as part of an effort to conserve the wetland the organisation has started a pilot project in Sembakkam lake that flows into the Pallikaranai marsh. Managing Director Seema Paul said that IIT-Madras was working on the hydrology of the lake to determine channels that lead up to the lake and lead out of it to understand where the blockages are as a first step to restoring the flow of water in it.

Local awareness

Observing that local communities in Chennai already had good awareness of the need to restore waterbodies in the aftermath of the 2015 floods, she said that in ten years they were expecting the organisation's efforts to help Chennai’s lakes turn very clean. She also expressed hope that declaring the Pallikaranai wetland as a Ramsar site would help save whatever was left of the waterbody, 90% of which has been already lost to unplanned development.