The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) is leading a first-of-its-kind project that will use storytelling, history and cultural heritage to build lasting community stewardship of Sri Lanka’s threatened urban wetlands in Colombo. This approach goes beyond conventional science-based conservation to address the deeper cultural roots of environmental change.
The two-year project, Rewriting Colombo’s Wetlands: Harnessing stories, histories and heritage for inclusive wetland management in Sri Lanka, was awarded through the British Academy’s International Interdisciplinary Research Projects 2026 program. It brings together IWMI’s Colombo-based research team with partners at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, to work directly with wetland communities across the city.
IWMI hydrologist Matthew McCartney brings a systems-level perspective to the project, with extensive experience researching Colombo’s wetland functions absorbing floodwater, recharging groundwater and regulating flows across the city. IWMI freshwater ecologist Chaturangi Wickramaratne, will lead the ecological dimension of the work, having spent years building community monitoring networks in the Colombo Wetland Complex. They will be joined by IWMI freshwater and wetland management researcher Radheeka Jirasinha.
“The science on Colombo’s wetlands is strong. We know what these ecosystems provide and how urgently they need protection,” said McCartney. “But knowledge alone has not been enough to stop the degradation. This project is about raising awareness — helping people see these wetlands not as distant landscapes, but as living systems they value, depend on, and are empowered to protect.”
That question has become increasingly pressing. Urban development and pollution have reduced the water storage capacity of Colombo’s wetlands by 40% since 2001, even as the city faces intensifying flood risk from climate change. Despite covering just 15% of Colombo’s total area, the wetlands retain 39% of floodwater during storm events — a function worth far more than the cost of the green and grey infrastructure it replaces. Colombo’s 2.3 million residents depend on these ecosystems, yet many continue to view them as wastelands rather than vital urban assets.
IWMI’s work has long recognized this gap between scientific value and community perception. Earlier projects supported by the United Kingdom’s Darwin Initiative established community monitoring mechanisms and aligned local wetland practices with government policy. This new project builds directly on that foundation, introducing a humanities-led dimension that previous technical approaches have not addressed.
“We’ve shown that community engagement can work in the Colombo wetlands,” said Wickramaratne. “Now we want to understand how culture, memory and identity can sustain that engagement over time, and how we can translate those lessons to other wetland cities.” The initiative brings together specialists across diverse fields, especially drawing on the University of Hull’s experience from the Risky Cities project to explore how approaches developed in other contexts can be evaluated and adapted for Colombo’s urban wetlands.
The project will co-produce research-informed learning histories together with wetland communities, drawing on the cultural, historical and narrative relationships between people and the landscapes they live alongside. Community interventions and co-created outputs including art, oral histories and local heritage mapping, will be produced across the two years. Building on IWMI’s previous work with the University of Kelaniya, which spanned ecosystem service assessment and valuation of peri-urban wetlands through modelling and stakeholder consultation, the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology (PGIAR) will now extend this collaboration into Sri Lankan historical and cultural contexts, ensuring the work reflects ancient knowledge systems and community priorities.
Findings will be shared with schools and state agencies across Sri Lanka, and disseminated to international policy audiences, with the aim of developing a transferable model for humanities-led wetland stewardship applicable to wetland cities across South Asia and beyond.
Through multi-faith, multi-ethnic community partnerships and co-developed anchor histories that bridge heritage and environmental narratives, this work will place communities as active custodians of their own environmental futures.
“Lasting change in how people relate to wetlands cannot come from policy alone,” said Jirasinha. “It must grow from within communities, from the stories people tell about these places, the connections they build with them, and the shared futures they imagine and choose to protect.”
Rewriting Colombo’s Wetlands will run from 2026 to 2028. It is funded by the British Academy’s International Interdisciplinary Research Projects program and is co-led by IWMI in partnership with the University of Hull and the University of Kelaniya.
