We are celebrating 400 years of this city this May, so it is a big deal around town if you haven't noticed. To my understanding, the city was founded deliberately in a wetland to keep the Swedes at bay. All the way through, wetlands have been an ecosystem service of defense. The wetlands have played both positive and negative roles in history. You know that much of the city was under water at one point.
And the Kristianstad Vattenrike Biosphere Reserve is trying to see how we learn from that history and use that history. This way we have pride in our history and see the amazing ingenuity of people. Now we have a chance to shift the focus from "waterlogged" to "water-rich". Let's turn this now and then we'll see the value in these wetlands and our historical relationship to them.