Banding Together to Build a Global Mangrove Movement Sandra Cuffe - Roads and Kingdoms
go to original October 13, 2022

Oscar González Díaz installs a motion sensor camera while on patrol. The reserve sustains many species of fish, and mammals such as deer and wild cats. (Felipe Jacome)

Oscar González Díaz takes a closer look at the mangroves surrounding a small patch of earth and vegetation, one of few remaining in this part of the lagoon. The leaves are sparse, but they will regenerate once the rains pick up and increase the ratio of freshwater to saltwater in the Chumbeño lagoon, connected to the ocean on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

A fisherman from Francisco Villa, one of the villages along the lagoon, González Díaz is also a community monitor in this area of the Marismas Nacionales Nayarit biosphere reserve. The protected area is home to 15-20 percent of Mexico’s mangroves, and local monitors have been working in tandem with governmental authorities and with support from conservation groups to monitor, protect, and restore them.

“This is natural restoration. More than 40 of us participated,” says González Díaz, standing barefoot in the muddy patch of greenery surrounded by dead mangrove trunks protruding from the lagoon surface. “It was a much taller forest than what is left.”

The Marismas biosphere reserve in the state of Nayarit is a vast area of interconnected mangrove forests, lagoons, wetlands and intertidal zones. Covering more than 1,300 square kilometers (800 square miles), it is larger than more than a third of national parks in the United States and United Kingdom. The biosphere reserve provides habitat for wildlife including jaguars and more than 250 bird species, and the mangroves are vital for the shrimp fishing that drives community economies.

“It is a reservoir of life,” says González Díaz. “A key role of the mangroves is as an incubator for shrimp. Everything is protected in the roots,” he says back on the shore, where some fishermen are taking advantage of downtime during the seasonal shrimp fishing ban to repair their nets.

In tropical and subtropical countries around the world, mangrove ecosystems provide community livelihoods, function as biodiversity hotspots, and help mitigate the effects of climate change. An understanding of their importance has been growing over the decades, but research and conservation efforts were often disconnected or localized. Five years ago, a few organizations banded together to try to change that.

The Global Mangrove Alliance was announced in 2017 by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund and established the following year with the goal of reversing mangrove loss and increasing mangrove habitat. An estimated 50 percent of the world’s mangroves have been lost in as many years, with devastating impacts on food sovereignty and climate change resilience, but the rate of loss has been slowing down substantially.

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