Rebuilding Wetlands and Waterfowl Resources in North and South America - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 150

thus might be considered to offer a sustainable solution which is, of course, to be
considered to be the ultimate goal in the forecasted restoration efforts in Iraq. In
this respect, the work is directly relevant to the situation in southern Iraq (Young
and Batt 2004).
t he P antanal
Based on Ducks Unlimited's demonstrated capability in using GIS analysis
for large-scale wetland planning, the three countries involved in the Pantanal
wetlands—Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay—requested the organization to come
and apply that technology with (not for) them in their countries. The impor-
tant point in this example is to demonstrate that capacity building—which all
agree is the key to eventual success in the sustainable development of the Iraqi
marshlands—is really the most effective way to undertake conservation (Young
and Batt 2004).
The Pantanal, at 485,000 square kilometers in size, is the largest wetland in the
world (see also chapter 12). This enormous size means that it is obviously too much
to tackle in its entirety given that the technology to be utilized had yet to be proven
in the region and also the people needed to be trained to use it. As a result, Ducks
Unlimited decided to develop a pilot project in an area shared by all three countries.
The ultimate objective was to develop a tool for the whole Pantanal by creating a GIS
database that would help formulate a conservation planning program that could be
delivered to the entire river basin.
Specifically, the objective of the pilot project was to develop the international
capacity for people in the countries to create a GIS tool so that they would have
ownership in terms of understanding how it operates and being able to use it inde-
pendently. The end product was that over two dozen individuals from the three coun-
tries associated with the Pantanal received training and actually developed the pilot
project themselves. What began as a training exercise for the locals with assistance
from eleven different partner organizations produced a product, which was the pilot
study. This pilot study was the paper product. But the most important result of the
enterprise was the fact that people were trained and developed the capacity to carry
on in the future on their own.
The strategy in starting with pilot projects is a well-established one in water-
shed management (France 2005, 2006) and is the obvious first step on the pathway
to undertaking the complicated restorative redevelopment work in the Iraqi marsh-
lands. In the Pantanal, for example, the pilot project has been completed, and fund-
ing secured and the wherewithal obtained to next target the entire wetland. And
indeed that is exactly the process that is currently underway there. The locals who
have now been trained in this capacity have gone ahead and are managing their wet-
land resources on their own, which is just the way it should be done in Iraq (Young
and Bratt 2004).
Some of these local initiatives include a highway-planning project being under-
taken in Brazil (the issue of roads and wetlands is of great importance, as described
in chapter 17), a hydrological study and precipitation analysis developed by individu-
als from all three countries, the creation of a program concerned with planning and