In global environmental forums to date, there has been a lot of attention on restoring terrestrial forests, says Kairo. “And that’s great, but mangroves tend to be forgotten in the process, despite their enormous contributions to livelihoods, biodiversity and environmental conservation.”
Situated between land and sea, mangroves play a critical role in protecting fisheries, and they can also serve to manage and prevent natural disasters such as flooding and cyclone damage. What’s more, they are able to store vast quantities of carbon.
As such, Kairo and his colleagues are working towards getting mangrove restoration integrated into Kenya’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reductions under the U.N. Paris Agreement on climate change.
It is a move they hope will help win mangroves the attention they deserve, before it is too late. Mangrove forests are one of the most degraded natural ecosystems, with 1 to 2 percent of global mangrove stocks disappearing every year, 23 percent of that total in Africa. In the western region, where most of the continent’s mangroves lie, almost 4,000 hectares are lost annually, which is a huge amount when you look at it, says Kairo.
The challenges facing mangroves globally are cross-cutting, he says. Overexploitation of wood products is the biggest threat. Mangrove forests are also vulnerable to conversion to other land uses like agriculture (such as rice paddies), aquaculture (such as shrimp farming), and urbanization. River pollution is another factor, because increased sedimentation affects mangrove health.
One obstacle for progress in mangrove restoration is the fact that many countries don’t even know how much mangrove forest they have, much less how degraded those forests are, or the rate of degradation. “If you don’t even know what you have, you’re unlikely to be able to manage it properly,” he says.