The Secretariat of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands has prepared a range of guidance documents to assist States and various stakeholders in implementing the convention. These include: guidelines, a series of handbooks, and a manual.
Guidelines for Implementing the Ramsar Convention
In order to assist States in implementing the Ramsar Convention, the Ramsar Secretariat has produced guidelines for management planning of designated Ramsar sites and other wetlands. The guidelines provide advice on incorporating good practice in management planning. These good practices include:
- adaptive management;
- integrated monitoring;
- environmental, social, and economic impact assessment;
- cost-benefit analysis;
- zoning and multiple use;
- design and maintenance of buffer zones; and
- application of the precautionary approach.
Other elements of the guidelines address monitoring programmes; wetland risk assessment framework; assessing and reporting change in ecological character; applying the Montreux Record “tool” of the Convention (see the case study following Guideline 14(d)
); and designing restoration programmes.
The guidelines focus particularly on issues relating to site-based management planning. It is recognised, however, that designated Ramsar sites include a wide range of different “sites”, ranging in size from less than 1 hectare to over 6 million hectares. Moreover, some sites have clearly delimited boundaries entailing simply a discrete wetland area, while others include surrounding non-wetland buffer zones, habitat mosaics, or catchment areas within their boundaries. Accordingly, the guidelines recognise that site-based management planning should be one element of a multi-scalar approach to wise-use planning and management and should be linked with broader-scale landscape and ecosystem planning, including at the integrated river basin and coastal zone scales. This is necessary since broad-scale policy and planning decisions affect the conservation and sustainable use of wetland sites.
The guidelines are available at http://www.ramsar.org/lib/lib_handbooks_e08pre.doc