Rebuild or Leave ‘Paradise’: Climate Change Dilemma Facing a Nicaraguan Coastal Town
Two major November hurricanes slammed into the same part of Nicaraguan coast, laying waste to the Miskito village of Haulover. Faced with a future of intensifying storms, the residents must now consider whether to abandon their way of life by the ocean and move inland.
The man helping to save Senegal’s mangroves
With the help of the local population, one man has led a program that has planted 152 million mangrove buds in the Casamance Delta of southern Senegal over the past decade. The reforestation project has become one of the largest of its kind in the world.
Five trees or a latte? Coastal communities seek help for mangroves
A Singapore-based online platform is to launch an app and website in the next six months using blockchain technology to fund mangrove restoration projects across India and Southeast Asia, to add 1 billion mangrove trees by 2025.
The wonder trees that nurture marine biodiversity
This 2020 theme for the International Day of Forests on 21 March is Forests and Biodiversity. Awareness is growing among governments and coastal communities in tropical countries of the incredible value of mangrove trees to nature and humans.
Mangrove forests protect coastlines. ‘Synthetic mangroves’ could do the same for cities.
To better understand exactly how mangroves can grow in the ocean yet pump freshwater up to their leaves, engineers constructed what they’re dubbing “synthetic mangroves.” The idea for using their wannabe trees: incorporating them into the design of cities to make buildings more resilient in the face of storm surges.
Mangrove conservation can pay for itself in flood protection
The natural coastal defenses provided by mangrove forests reduce annual flooding significantly in critical hotspots around the world. Without mangroves, flood damages would increase by more than $65 billion annually, and 15 million more people would be flooded, according to a new study.
This vanishing forest protects the coasts—and lives—of two countries
Rising waters and illicit logging are killing the trees in the Sundarbans, the natural wall that protects the India-Bangladesh coast.
Pemex is illegally destroying protected mangrove trees to build an $8 billion oil refinery
Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex has defied a government order by cutting down protected mangrove trees for the construction of an oil refinery. Satellite images show a landscape razed presumably to accommodate the controversial $8 billion project.
Mangrove forests provide cause for conservation optimism, for now
More than a decade ago, academics warned that mangrove forests were being lost faster than almost any other ecosystem, including coral reefs and tropical rainforests. But things are looking better.