?Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Arnold Pig­gott is ap­peal­ing to cit­i­zens to pre­serve and sus­tain T&T's wet­lands be­cause it pro­vides part of the so­lu­tion to cli­mate change. Pig­gott said so while de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress in recog­ni­tion of World Wet­lands Day on Tues­day. The cel­e­bra­tion ex­er­cise took place at the Ca­roni Swamp Vis­i­tor Cen­tre, off the Uri­ah But­ler High­way. This year's theme for World Wet­lands Day cel­e­bra­tion is Car­ing for Wet­lands–An An­swer to Cli­mate Change. "Wet­lands are con­stant­ly un­der threat, par­tic­u­lar­ly from hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties and we must be sen­si­tive to its fragili­ty," Pig­gott said. He said wa­ter-borne pol­lu­tion from in­dus­tri­al, min­ing, quar­ry­ing and do­mes­tic ac­tiv­i­ties, even ex­e­cut­ed at some con­sid­er­able dis­tance from the wet­lands area, have had as de­struc­tive an im­pact as the fill­ing, al­ter­ation and the de­vel­op­ment of the wet­lands them­selves.

He said the re­cent glob­al de­vel­op­ments per­ti­nent to the im­pact of cli­mate change had brought a re­newed fo­cus on en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues. Pig­gott said wet­lands helped in re­duc­ing the lev­els of at­mos­pher­ic car­bon. If prop­er­ly man­aged, he said, wet­lands could act as a buffer to the worst ef­fects of cli­mate change through the process of pho­to­syn­the­sis by wet­land plants. "It is part of the so­lu­tion to the much talked about cli­mate change, but it is im­por­tant that we man­age them well in or­der to pre­serve their ecosys­tem and bio­di­ver­si­ty," he said. Wet­lands can be gen­er­al­ly de­scribed as low­land ar­eas sat­u­rat­ed with wa­ter flow­ing, fresh, brack­ish or salt � such as swamps and marsh­es.

Pig­gott said wet­lands al­so played a very im­por­tant part in the wa­ter cy­cle. "This was very im­por­tant for T&T be­cause the na­tion has been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing un­char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly low lev­els of rain­fall, which has cre­at­ed chal­lenges with re­spect to our wa­ter sup­ply," he said. He said wet­lands were very im­por­tant to the wa­ter cy­cle be­cause they were valu­able wa­ter stor­age ar­eas which al­lowed for sig­nif­i­cant evap­o­ra­tion to oc­cur. "There­fore, we have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect and safe­guard our wa­ter sources," he said. "Car­ing for our wet­lands is not an op­tion, it is an im­per­a­tive."