"Liquid assets" : Coastal wetlands, regional parks, and the protection of Mediterranean deltas
Gorostiza, Santiago (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut d'Història de la Ciència)
Parrinello, Giacomo (Center for History at Sciences Po)
Aguettaz-Vilchez, Daniel (Center for History at Sciences Po)

Date:	2024
Description:	22 pàg.
Abstract:	After a century of accelerating drainage, in the 1960s coastal wetlands became the object of unprecedented protection campaigns around the world. This paper compares the history of three successful cases of coastal wetland protection in the Mediterranean between the 1960s and 1980s: the Rhône (France), Po (Italy), and Ebro (Spain) River deltas. As most of the coast of Mediterranean Europe, these three cases were at the centre of renewed redevelopment attempts, to further expand intensive agriculture, industry, and seaside tourism, which invariably involved wetlands drainage. In these three cases, protection was achieved by establishing "regional parks" in the deltas. We argue that it was not by chance. Wetland advocates at the international, national, and local scales coated their plea for protection in the language of economics, making the case for wetlands' value as "liquid assets. " They argued that wetland protection could rhyme with development and, abandoning initial projects to protect deltas as national parks, focused their efforts on creating regional parks instead. Stemming from the European regional planning movement, the regional park framework proved expedient to combine development expectations and wetland protection. Thanks to modular land use zoning, it promised to combine productive activities with protected areas, without imposing uniform restrictions on the entire deltas such as those often associated with national parks. The history of these three coastal parks, therefore, sheds light on the counterintuitive but strong relationship existing between coastal development and protection by uncovering the discursive strategies and unlikely coalitions that made conservation possible.
Grants:	European Commission 101042252
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	MAR project ; Mediterranean ; Coast ; Conservation ; Deltas ; Environmental history ; Regional parks ; Regional planning ; Wetland drainage ; Wetlands ; SDG 15 - Life on Land
Published in:	Coastal Studies and Society, Vol. 3, Issue 4 (September 2024) , pag.181-202, ISSN 2634-9817

DOI: 10.1177/26349817241282720

22 p, 704.0 KB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > Institut d'Història de la Ciència (IHC)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles