Mangrove forests work as obvious and natural buffers in the same way kelp forests and barrier reefs do, simply by physical presence and resultant buffering. But they also protect the land behind them by building up soil and sediment, rising along with the sea.
A new study, based on computer modeling, says that mangrove forests are suddenly beginning to sequester less carbon, and that, perhaps, efforts to restore and better their habitats could be futile. The meta message: Yes, “Mangrove Forests Fight Climate Change—But Climate Change Is Fighting Back,” reads a recent Inside Climate News headline highlighting the findings of a modeling study just published in the journal Earth’s Future.
So do we throw up our hands and surf our way into the apocalypse, which we’ll deal with later, whenever it arrives? Why not? There’s enough doom and gloom about these days to point us in that fatalistic direction.
On the other hand, the study, titled “The Importance of Scale in the Future of Mangrove Blue Carbon Under Sea-Level Rise,” focuses on carbon alone, only one small piece of a much larger puzzle. The scope of the study also remained within areas where mangrove forests lie in low land behind beachfronts, and/or back up onto—and are stifled by—human development or simply, through little to no fault of human civilization insufficient hydrology.
When there’s no natural irrigation in areas like the aforementioned, says Michael Stewart, founder of the nonprofit organization Seatrees, which works to reforest and protect mangroves, coral reefs, kelp forests, as well as seagrasses and other estuarine habitats around the globe.
“The major point that the study pointed out was not necessarily that mangroves were doing a bad job,” Steward tells us, “but that coastal infrastructure (roads, buildings) was built right up to the mangroves, and would therefore keep the forest from being able to adapt and move inland if needed.”
“The fix,” says Stewart, is to “restore the hydrology connection (digging out blocked channels) between these areas and the ocean, so that the tide flows in and out like it normally would and doesn’t simply get trapped.”
These are no small undertakings, to be sure, but Stewart points out that they do have historical precedence: “Infrastructure can and has been moved (including managed retreat efforts like the city of Ventura has done at C-Street/Surfers Point) to allow the natural systems to better do the job that they were designed to—by millions of years of evolution,” notes Stewart, adding that having been around for the last 50 million years, mangroves are “one of the oldest forest systems on the planet.”
In all likelihood, they’ll figure it out on their own. But by giving them their due space and lending a hand, they’ll do all that and more: Mangroves “provide protection against storm impacts for local communities, habitat for a wide variety of biodiversity (land, sea, and air), they are the nursery for many important marine species, they improve and are the foundation of local fisheries…” and so on, says Stewart.
A case in point for how humans can make way for mangrove forests can be found in Seatrees’ Marereni, Kenya project—which, incidentally, is also producing the world’s first marine-based biodiversity credits specifically for mangrove forests. (Per Seatrees: “The credits are registered on the Blockchain for transparency, and an interactive dashboard is available to the supporters of this project.”)
The mangroves have, can, and continue to contain multitudes. Here’s to humanity having the good sense to make way for nature.
Learn more about Seatrees, and how and where you can help their efforts, here.
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