Lush mangrove forest lining Mida Creek in Malindi, Kenya. ? Timothy K. /Unsplash
In many wetland communities, the calendar isn’t printed. It’s read. People watch water levels, study wind shifts, notice bird movements and welcome the first insects of the season to decide when to fish and when to plant. These rules are rarely written down, but they are passed down from generation to generation—and they have kept ecosystems functioning long after formal policies have come and gone.
Wetlands are often treated as a footnote in environmental policy and are rarely framed with the scale of forests or the urgency of oceans. Yet for communities around the world, wetlands are home, livelihood and culture.
The 2026 theme for World Wetlands Day—wetlands and traditional knowledge—draws attention to a reality that has shaped wetland stewardship for centuries. Indigenous Peoples and local communities both in Africa and around the globe have long managed wetlands in ways that sustain water, food, biodiversity and resilience. Their knowledge is practical. It is refined by experience and applied through daily decisions about timing, harvesting and protection.
In Botswana’s Okavango Delta, conservation is built into daily life. The seasonal flood pulse that fills the channels and floodplains also sets the rhythm for farming and fishing, and for gathering what families need from the land. Communities such as the WaYei, Hambukushu and San plant as the waters recede and fish as stocks move through the lagoons, harvesting reeds and grasses carefully so they are not depleted.
Most of the Delta remains under communal tribal land tenure, and these low-level subsistence uses have shaped how the landscape is managed for generations. The result is an ecosystem that has remained intact expressly because local peoples have continued to manage the wetlands in a way that ensures their own livelihoods as well as wetland health.
A woman known as Mama Laurinda starts work before the tide turns, coordinating a small group of oyster and clam harvesters in the mangroves outside Luanda, along Angola’s coast. They rely on the tidal flats for their income, and over time she has worked out when certain areas should be left alone and when harvesting needs to pause so stocks can recover.
She watches what gets dumped into the channels and steps in when it threatens the water they depend on. Nothing is written down. The rules come from years on the water and from paying attention to what changes. Because of that, the mangroves keep coming back and the work continues, season after season.
Further afield at Lake Uru Uru in Bolivia—a Wetland of International Importance—community leader and lawyer Dayana Blanco Quiroga mobilizes women to restore a polluted lake using ancestral knowledge, legal tools and hands-on restoration work. The ecosystem had been damaged by mining and waste, and recovery required more than technical fixes. It required local leadership rooted in the lake’s cultural and ecological reality. Her work earned the first-ever Ramsar Award for Indigenous Peoples Conservation and Wise Use and it offered a clear lesson: restoration succeeds when communities are in the lead.
In Bali, traditional knowledge has shaped water governance for centuries through the subak system. Farmers manage irrigation through local institutions that coordinate planting schedules and water distribution across entire landscapes. The structure is practical and disciplined. It helps reduce pest pressure, supports yields and manages scarcity through shared rules rather than competition. Subak has endured because it solves real problems, season after season, under changing conditions.
These examples point to a pattern: wetlands recover faster and remain healthier when local governance, traditional knowledge and community leadership are part of management from the start. That is why traditional knowledge belongs in environmental policy as a serious input to planning, budgeting and decision-making.
The Convention on Wetlands has recognized this direction for decades. Resolutions and guidance adopted since the 1990s reflect an evolution toward active involvement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in wetland governance, including through community-based approaches and recognition of cultural values. At COP15 of the Convention on Wetlands, held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, Parties reinforced this further with a CEPA Resolution. It urges governments to involve Indigenous Peoples and local communities in decision-making through education, participation and awareness—moving engagement from outreach activity to governance outcomes. This aligns with the Convention’s Fifth Strategic Plan and its emphasis on cultural values, participation and knowledge integration.
Progress is visible, but uneven. Many communities still face major barriers, including insecure tenure, limited access to restoration finance and weak representation in governance structures. In those conditions, traditional knowledge remains present but under-supported and restoration remains slower and more fragile than it needs to be.
There isn’t only one path to wetland recovery, but one principle holds across regions: traditional knowledge has been sustaining wetlands for generations and it remains one of the most effective guides we have for what comes next.