Mangroves Protect Coastlines and Store Carbon
Often overlooked, mangroves play an essential role in coastal protection, biodiversity and the fight against climate change.
With their feet in salt water and roots raised like stilts, mangroves grow where almost no other tree can survive, at the boundary between land and ocean. This botanical feat makes them one of the most valuable ecosystems along tropical coastlines.
Three irreplaceable services
Coastal shields
Their tangled roots break wave energy and reduce the impact of storms, cyclone-driven surges and erosion. For coastal communities, a healthy mangrove is a natural barrier that saves lives and homes, often more effectively and sustainably than a concrete seawall.
Nurseries and food sources
The submerged roots shelter the young of many fish and crustacean species. Destroying a mangrove reduces fish populations kilometres away and weakens the food security of millions of people who depend directly on them.
Blue-carbon champions
For the same area, mangroves store far more carbon than terrestrial forests, much of it in waterlogged soils where organic matter decomposes very slowly:
Destroying them releases this “blue carbon”, while restoring them traps it again.
A threatened but restorable ecosystem
Threatened by intensive aquaculture, coastal urbanisation and pollution, mangroves are now the focus of restoration programmes in many countries. Replanting mangroves remains one of the most cost-effective actions available for the climate, biodiversity and coastal communities at the same time.
- Mangroves protect coastlines from storms better than many seawalls.
- They are nurseries for an essential share of tropical fisheries.
- For the same area, they can store up to four times more carbon than a tropical forest.