It’s World Wetlands Day! 

World Wetlands Day is a global awareness campaign celebrated every year on 2 February to highlight the value of wetlands. And, not coincidentally, today is also the official opening day of the Global Wetland Center that DHI has established together with the University of Copenhagen and GEUS! 

What is the Global Wetland Center? 

The Global Wetland Center (GWC) will spend the next six years on acquiring more knowledge on how wetlands can reduce the emission and increase the absorption of greenhouse gases. The researchers working in the centre will also investigate the mechanisms that result in emissions of e.g. methane and nitrous oxide. 

GWC will focus on research and innovation within digital modelling tools, artificial intelligence and satellite data with an ambition to be able to provide nations all over the world with knowledge and concrete solutions to their work on reaching climate targets. The centre’s work will also lead to recommendations which will be presented to political decision makers through the centre’s close affiliation with UN’s environmental programme, UNEP. DHI already collaborates closely with UNEP through the UNEP-DHI Centre. 

The centre will also be carrying out case studies with experiments in different types of wetlands, initially in Vietnam, Tanzania and Norway. It is a priority for the centre researchers that their results do not end up on a shelf but are quickly disseminated as actionable data to decision-makers. 

‘Our ambition is to make sure that the research and findings in the centre are used to ultimately guide policymaking. Our close collaboration with UNEP through our UNEP-DHI Centre enables us to spread our findings even wider on a global scale for positive impact on climate change mitigation,’ explains Christian Toettrup, Senior Project Manager in Data & Analytics at DHI. 

GWC is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation with DKK 60 million.