From WorldChanging: Restoring Mangroves.
A half-century ago, if you approached a point on the shore along the rim of Indian Ocean, you probably would have come upon endless acres of mangroves. Swampy rainforests hugging the edges of both land and sea, Indo-Pacific mangroves are storehouses of biodiversity, home to the world's richest variety of salt-tolerant trees, ferns, and shrubs. Hundreds of different birds live in the trees, which also shelter migratory species. Mangroves are rich in sea life — from plankton, to mollusks, to shell and fin fish — and well-populated with crocodiles, monkeys, wild cats, lizards, sea turtles, and more.
Mangroves also insulate coastlines and coastal communities from the abuses of the ocean — erosion, storms, and waves.
Fast forward 50 years: on December 25, 2004, if you approched the shore along the rim of the Indian Ocean, you would have been much more likely to come upon a shrimp farm, urban landfill, or tourist resort than a rainforest. In the past half-century, over half the world's mangroves - estimated to have covered 22 million hectares (54,340,000 acres) of tropical and subtropical coastlines in the middle of the last century - have been lost to development, oil exploration, pollution, inland irrigation, and especially shrimp aquaculture, an export industry frequently underwritten by international development lenders like the World Bank and the Inter-Asian Development Bank.
From Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta to southeastern India's Goadavari-Krishna mangroves, to the Sundarbans mangroves along the India-Bangladesh coast (home to nearly 700 endangered tigers), small pockets of mangroves have hung on, sometimes as protected areas, all highly endangered.
But in this terrible time after the tsunamis, place, environment, ecology and economics have combined to illuminate the simple sense of reforesting the mangroves. [continue]
Related:
Mangrove Action Project