In Mexico, successes exist, even if they are slow in coming. Community outreach and education have been slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Newly planted mangroves have been swept out to sea by strong tides and waves. Precise mapping and data on mangroves is hard to come by, making it difficult for agencies to know where to concentrate.
Key ministries are involved in restoration efforts that include community outreach and education. 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. 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.īut there have been restoration efforts as well. The halting efforts in Mexico to protect and restore mangroves, even as more are lost, mirror situations elsewhere.
In the past six years, Mexico has cut resources for environmental conservation by 60%, according to Carabias.Īnd that, combined with increasing government support of fossil fuel energy and ongoing infrastructure and tourist projects in the region, is sounding alarms.ĭespite 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. And although Mexico took steps to establish a climate action plan in 1998 and was one of the first developing countries to make voluntary commitments under the Paris Climate Accord, its commitment to the environment began to backslide in 2015, said Julia Carabias, a professor on the science faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Mexico began to protect some of its mangroves only after the excessive tourism development of the 1980s. Tracts of mangroves on the country’s southern Pacific coast also have been cleared to make room for shrimp farming, while oil exploration and drilling in shallow waters off the Gulf of Mexico threatens mangroves there, said Aburto. The region near Cancun lost most of its historic mangroves to highways and hotels starting in the 1980s. In Mexico, as in much of the world, the largest threat to mangroves is development. Food and Agriculture Organization.įrom 2000 to 2016, the rate of loss declined as governments and environmental groups spotlighted the problem, but destruction continued - and about 2% of the world’s remaining mangrove forests disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. From 1980 to 2005, 20% to 35% of the world’s mangrove forests were lost, according to the U.N.
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