Internationally, mangroves have started to be recognized for their ability to store carbon and their protection is increasingly seen as an important piece of the puzzle to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Despite their importance, mangroves are faced with many threats, such as intensive logging for timber and charcoal production, coastal development, pollution, and aquaculture, the latter often driven by international demand. Between 1980 and 2000, about 35 % of mangrove forests have disappeared. Growing only in the narrow margin between land and sea, as well as in estuaries, mangroves cover about 15 million hectares of tropical and subtropical coastal area worldwide, which is about 0.1 % of the global landmass. However, due to their ability to store 3 – 5 times more carbon than terrestrial forests per hectare, 10 % of global carbon emissions caused by deforestation are due to the loss of mangroves.
In the Western Indian Ocean region, four countries – Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Tanzania – hold 99 % of the regional mangrove forest. Here, the initiative Save Our Mangroves Now!, a partnership by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and Wetlands International, with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), has been working since 2016 to halt and reverse the loss of mangroves. The aim of the initiative is to work towards conserving, restoring and sustainably using mangrove ecosystems to the benefit of people and nature, locally and globally. More recently, the initiative has focused on bringing mangroves to the forefront of regional and international policy making. Through these aims, it will contribute to the achievement of the Agenda 2030, the Paris Agreement, and the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi targets as well as their successors.
In the region, Save Our Mangroves Now! partners work to increase national and regional commitments towards mangrove conservation to achieve zero net-loss by 2030 and thereby ensure that mangroves continue to provide their live-saving ecosystem services to coastal communities. Regional mapping of mangroves was conducted in 2020 to set a baseline detailing the status of mangroves, and capacity-building workshops have been conducted, for example in the form of a train-the-trainers workshop on mangrove restoration as well as legal capacity building. In addition, regional studies into the legal and institutional frameworks governing mangroves and the socio-economic role of mangroves in the focal region aim to underline the importance of sustainable mangrove management to policy makers. A successful project mapped the mangroves and carbon stored therein in Kenya’s previously unchartered, biggest mangrove forest in the county of Lamu. These efforts have contributed towards the acknowledgement of the pivotal role marine and coastal ecosystems play through inclusion of mangroves in Kenya’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2020 and the development of national mangrove strategies. Further inputs continue to be provided to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity, thereby bringing the regional commitments to the international policy agenda.
A unique feature of the Save Our Mangroves Now! initiative is the combination of regional and international policy work. National strategies are necessary to protect the local mangrove forests from unsustainable exploitation while enabling coastal communities to continue using the available resources sustainably for subsistence and food security. However, international commitments are also vital to enable framework conditions for mangrove conservation and to bring the knowledge as well as the needs of countries with large extents of mangrove forests to the international policy table. The ecosystem services that mangroves provide extend beyond local communities due to their capability to mitigate climate change and their protection is therefore of interest to all of us.
About the author
Dr. Laura Puk is a marine ecologist and conservationist. She works at WWF Germany, coordinating the regional components of the Save Our Mangroves Now! initiative. Prior to starting work at WWF, Laura worked on marine policy at the European Commission and gained her PhD studying coral reef ecology in Palau and Australia.
