Restoring mangroves can shield shores, store carbon
PROGRESO, MEXICO — When a rotten egg smell rises from the mangrove swamps of southeast Mexico, something is going well. It means that this key coastal habitat for blunting hurricane impacts has recovered and is capturing carbon dioxide — the main ingredient of global warming.
While world leaders sought ways to stop the climate crisis at a United Nations conference in Scotland this month, one front in the battle to save the planet’s mangroves is thousands of miles away on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Decades ago, mangroves lined these shores, but today there are only thin green bands of trees beside the sea, interrupted by urbanized areas and reddish segments killed by too much salt and by dead branches poking from the water.
A few dozen fishermen and women villagers have made building on what’s left of the mangroves part of their lives. Their work is supported by academics and donations to environmental groups, and government funds help train villagers to organize their efforts.
To dig them was hard work and paid only $4 a day. Men from Chelem, a fishing village of Progreso, turned down the job but a group of women took it on, believing they could accomplish a lot with little money.
Global threat to mangroves
This mangrove restoration effort is similar to others around the globe, as scientists and community groups increasingly recognize the need to protect and bring back the forests to store carbon and buffer coastlines from climate-driven extreme weather, including more intense hurricanes and storm surges. Other restorations are underway in Indonesia, which contains the world’s largest tracts of mangrove habitat, Colombia and elsewhere.
“Mangroves represent a very important ecosystem to fight climate change,” said Octavio Aburto, a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.
Despite the country’s monitoring system, local researchers say that for every hectare (2.5 acres) of mangrove restored in southeast Mexico, 10 hectares are degraded or lost.
Efforts to save swamps
The halting efforts in Mexico to protect and restore mangroves, even as more are lost, mirror situations elsewhere. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency estimated in 2007 that 40% of Indonesia’s mangroves had been cut down for aquaculture projects and coastal development in the previous three decades.
But there have been restoration efforts as well.
In 2020, the Indonesia government set an ambitious target of planting mangroves on 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of degrading coastline by 2024. Key ministries are involved in restoration efforts that include community outreach and education.
Yet there have been some setbacks. Precise mapping and data on mangroves is hard to come by, making it difficult for agencies to know where to concentrate. Newly planted mangroves have been swept out to sea by strong tides and waves. Community outreach and education have been slowed by the COVID19 pandemic.
José Inés Loría, head of operations at San Crisanto, an old salt harvesting community of about 500 between Progreso and Dzilam, thinks the way to make the local mangrove part “of the community’s business model” is using the new financial tools such as blue carbon credits.
Some in Mexico say credits are still not well regulated in the country and could invite fraud and scams. But Loria defends them. “If conservation doesn’t mean improving the quality of life of a community, it doesn’t work.”