Urban Wetlands Law

The law intends to provide a set of "minimal criteria for the sustainability of urban wetlands, safeguarding its ecological characteristics and their functioning, and to maintain the hydrological regime, both on surface and under the ground".

[A][1] At the request of municipal government the law allows for the Ministry of the Environment to declare official urban wetlands.

[2] As of July 2023 about hundred urban wetlands had been legally established, yet in eleven cases the declaration had been challenged and rejected.

[3] Real estate developers have been the main challengers to the legal establishment of urban wetlands.

[3] The scope of the law includes "marshes, swamps, peatlands or water-covered surfaces, be these either natural or artificial, permanent or temporal, stagnant or flowing, sweet, brackish or salt, including areas of sea water, whose depth a low tide does not exceed 6 m".