Efforts to revive mangroves can flip the tide on India’s coastal safety

Throughout India’s coasts, from the languid channels of the Sundarbans delta to Mumbai’s stifled creeks, mangroves type a barrier between land and sea. These coastal forests are important in India’s pursuit of local weather resilience, biodiversity conservation, and the empowerment of coastal communities.

Nevertheless, within the face of city growth, local weather change, and growth, how are India’s mangroves surviving — and who’s defending them?

Mangroves matter

Mangrove swamps are forested wetlands characterised by bushes that may tolerate saline water. They function pure limitations, defending coastal communities from cyclones, tidal surges, and erosion. Throughout pure disasters just like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and recurring cyclones within the Bay of Bengal, mangroves have been recognized to attenuate harm to coastal infrastructure and biodiversity and have saved 1000’s of lives.

Their function in biodiversity conservation is important as nicely. Mangroves present breeding and nursery grounds for fish, crustaceans, molluscs, and migratory birds. These salt-tolerant forests additionally retailer vital quantities of blue carbon (the carbon captured by marine and coastal ecosystems), serving to mitigate local weather change by trapping carbon dioxide from the ambiance of their roots and soil.

The mangroves of India cowl greater than 4,900 sq. km, together with in estuaries, deltas, and alongside the coasts of West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, and Karnataka, amongst different States. For coastal communities, particularly conventional fishers and honey gatherers, mangroves are intimately linked to livelihoods and cultural practices.

But they’re more and more threatened by city growth, aquaculture, air pollution, and altering local weather patterns. This isn’t the case in India alone: all over the world, greater than half of all mangrove ecosystems are prone to collapse by 2050, in accordance with a latest report from the Worldwide Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Despite these mounting threats, nevertheless, India can also be the epicentre of a rising variety of inspiring efforts to guard and revive mangrove ecosystems. With the correct mix of stewardship, scientific assist, and coverage consideration, they’re exhibiting that mangroves can’t solely survive: they’ll thrive.

Mangroves in Tamil Nadu

Lately, efforts to revive mangroves throughout Tamil Nadu have seen outstanding progress, pushed by a mixture of presidency initiatives, neighborhood participation, and scientific planning. As soon as severely degraded by shrimp farming, industrial air pollution, and altered hydrology, the State’s estuaries and coasts are as we speak witnessing a sluggish however regular comeback.

Underneath the Inexperienced Tamil Nadu Mission and different coastal restoration programmes, the districts of Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, and Cuddalore amongst others have considerably expanded mangrove cowl. Because of this, Tamil Nadu almost doubled its mangrove extent — from 4,500 hectares to greater than 9,000 hectares between 2021 and 2024 — and has been main coastal ecosystem restoration in India.

In early 2017, the M.S. Swaminathan Analysis Basis in Chennai in collaboration with native village committees and the Tamil Nadu Forest Division started a challenge to revive 115 hectares of degraded mangroves within the Pattuvanachi estuary of Muthupettai. After thorough web site assessments and neighborhood engagement, the workforce dug 19 main canals to revive tidal move. Then workforce members planted greater than 4.3 lakh Avicennia seeds from Muthupettai and 6,000 Rhizophora propagules from Pichavaram, efficiently regenerating a once-stagnant panorama right into a thriving mangrove forest.

One more success story from Tamil Nadu is the restoration of a inexperienced belt of mangroves close to Buckingham Canal in Kazhipattur in Chennai. Underneath the Inexperienced Tamil Nadu Mission, the Forest Division planted 12,500 mangrove seedlings from 5 species in 2024 with the assistance of scientific specialists. The restoration concerned eradicating invasive Prosopis juliflora weeds earlier than planting the mangroves, with the objective of restoring Chennai’s pure defend towards cyclones and storm surges.

Conservation in Mumbai

In early 2025, Amazon’s Proper Now Local weather Fund partnered with Hasten Regeneration and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Company to launch a $1.2 million (Rs 10.3 crore as on July 24, 2025) restoration challenge alongside Thane Creek in Mumbai, aimed toward reviving important mangrove forests and mudflats that assist migratory flamingos and greater than 180 different hen species.

The challenge mixed ecological restoration with city cleanup: biodegradable limitations known as trash booms have been put in to intercept plastic air pollution, concentrating on the gathering of no less than 150 tonnes of plastic over three years. Concurrently, the initiative has deliberate to plant about 3.75 lakh mangrove saplings, creating new habitat for flamingos and empowering native communities, particularly ladies, by offering paid employment in planting and upkeep actions.

By focusing each on ecological restoration and socio-economic resilience, this challenge exemplifies how corporate-backed, nature-based options can advance biodiversity safety in India’s quickly urbanising coastal zones.

Gujarat’s success

The State of Gujarat has grow to be a nationwide chief in mangrove restoration beneath the Indian authorities’s Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes scheme, which was launched on World Setting Day 2023.

Underneath this scheme, Gujarat has planted greater than 19,000 hectares of mangroves in two years, surpassing the Central authorities’s deliberate five-year goal of 54,000 hectares.

The objective of this effort is to rebuild coastal resilience throughout the Kutch and coastal Saurashtra areas, supporting biodiversity and native livelihoods alike, selling ecotourism, and contributing to the nation’s blue carbon objectives.

Gujarat is already residence to 23.6% of India’s mangrove cowl and at present an instance of how sturdy planning and strategic coastal mapping can assist rapidly upscale restoration efforts.

These tales from India’s coastal communities present us that mangrove conservation isn’t just doable however truly nicely underway. Such tales of hope should grow to be the norm, not the exception.

As local weather change and rampant developmental actions proceed to ravage our coasts, the necessity to shield what stays and restore what’s misplaced has by no means been extra pressing. Mangroves are the primary line of defence towards storms, they usually additionally shelter fisheries and retailer carbon.

Priya Ranganathan is a doctoral pupil and researcher on the Ashoka Belief for Analysis in Ecology and the Setting (ATREE), Bengaluru.