In recent years, the impacts of climate change have become increasingly evident and severe, posing a significant threat to human life and well-being.
Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and rising sea levels are just a few of the many consequences of climate change, and they are not only causing widespread damage to property and infrastructure but also disrupting ecosystems, displacing communities, and exacerbating existing social and economic inequalities.
The risks associated with climate change are expected to increase if we fail to take urgent action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and invest in nature-based solutions to build climate-resilient infrastructure.
One nature-based community project in Egypt is helping to fight climate change by planting mangroves on the Red Sea coast. These unique ecosystems, thriving at the interface of land and sea, act as nature’s defence system. Their tangled roots hold the soil in place, safeguarding coastlines from erosion, providing protection from storms, and acting as a living barrier against surging waves.
The Mangrove Ecosystem Restoration Model (MERS) project is being implemented by the Centre of Applied Research on the Environment and Sustainability (CARES) at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and is funded by the HSBC bank through the Climate Solutions Partnership, a five-year philanthropic collaboration to scale climate solutions by combining HSBC’s financial expertise with the knowledge and experience of the World Resources Institute (WRI), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and a network of local partners.
It is backed by $100 million of philanthropic funding from HSBC between 2020 and 2025 and is divided into three workstreams, each critical to increasing progress towards a pathway to a net-zero future. The three sectors that the Partnership supports are Energy Transition in Asia, Nature-Based Solutions, and Business Innovation.
According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the restoration and protection of mangroves can also help to combat climate change through carbon sequestration. Mangroves are carbon-rich ecosystems and can hold an average of 1,000 tons of carbon per hectare in their biomass and soils.
“MERS is a nature-based solution to climate change, and the project aims to adopt a nature-based solution to address the challenges of climate change and enhance the environmental, social, and economic resilience of the most vulnerable local communities by restoring and rehabilitating the mangrove ecosystem in Egypt,” said Yasmine Abdel-Maqsoud, senior technical manager and the Cares-MERS project manager.
Mangrove ecosystems are precious as they are one of Earth’s most productive and biologically diverse wetland systems. They guard the coasts against storms and protect coastal areas from erosion from sea tides and storms. Abdel-Maqsoud also noted that mangrove ecosystems act as a nursery for fish and other species essential to the livelihoods of coastal residents and people that depend on blue water food.
A paper released by the MERS project in May and published in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology analysed the mangrove distribution along the Egyptian Red Sea coast and found an increase in mangrove area of 4.5 hectares (two per cent annual growth) from 2003 to 2022.
However, it also revealed a decrease in mangrove cover by 24 per cent in southern areas, particularly around Halayeb, likely due to environmental and human development pressures.
According to the Global Mangrove Alliance, an umbrella organisation launched in 2018, of the 11,700 km2 of mangroves lost since 1996, approximately 8,183 km2 are considered restorable. But it has asked that long-term secure protection is increased from 40 per cent to 80 per cent of the world’s remaining mangroves, as 42 per cent are currently in protected areas.
It is urgent to secure a further 61,000 km2 under conservation measures.
According to the Global Mangrove Watch, an online platform providing remote sensing data and tools for monitoring mangroves worldwide, the extent of the world’s mangroves decreased by 5,245.24 km2 between 1996 and 2020. The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information has said that global mangrove loss is attributed primarily to human activity.
Anthropogenic loss hotspots across Southeast Asia and around the world have characterised mangrove ecosystems as highly threatened, though natural processes such as erosion can also play a significant role in their vulnerability. Some 62 per cent of global losses of mangroves between 2000 and 2016 resulted from land‐use change, primarily through conversion to aquaculture and agriculture.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that from 1980 to 2005, between 20 and 35 per cent of the world’s mangrove forests were lost, which is why restoring them has become more and more necessary across the world.
DIVERSITY
“Mangroves serve as a source and a repository for nutrients and sediments for other coastal marine habitats, such as seagrass beds and coral reefs, and they have remarkable capacities for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, which is why it is one of the natural solutions aiding in the climate change challenge,” Abdel-Maksoud said.
According to a UNEP report titled “Decades of Mangrove Forest Change: What Does it Mean for Nature, People, and the Climate,” nearly 50 per cent of mangrove-associated mammals, 22 per cent of fish, 16 per cent of plants, 13 per cent of amphibians, and eight per cent of bird and reptile species are threatened with extinction. Worryingly, for 44 per cent of these species, their extinction risk is increasing; of those already at risk, the situation is getting worse for 89 per cent.
In order to help combat this problem by restoring mangrove habitats, the MERS project commenced in 2021 and is scheduled to be completed by 2025. It began planting new mangroves in Safaga and Hamata on the Red Sea coast and has continued to do so over five years, Abdel-Maqsoud said.
“The model has been optimised to suit the Egyptian context and allow for easy scalability to target barriers or barriers to scaling up nature-based solutions to climate change such as lack of financing, political will, and technical skills and capacities,” she added, saying that the project has planted 15,000 seedlings of two mangrove species, Avicennia marina, commonly known as grey mangrove or white mangrove, and Rhizophora mucronate, or loop-root mangrove, over three years.
In addition, to its restoration work the project has also arranged community awareness sessions, such as the Safaga Mangroves Beach Clean-up and the Hamata School Awareness sessions. It has also organised literacy training for the Hamata community.
The literacy programme in Hamata at Marsa Alam is designed to empower the community by enabling its members to acquire basic reading, writing, and literacy skills and to attain a literacy certificate where they lack them. The unique feature of the programme is that it employs tutors from the local community, providing local people who have high school certificates with curricula, teaching tools, and teaching guidance to enable them to provide learners with the necessary skills.
The programme comprises three levels, each with specific learning objectives and activities. Learners take pre- and post-tests before and after each level. When the learner passes the post-test, both the learner and his or her tutor receive an incentive for passing. For Abdel-Maqsoud, this community-based results-oriented model is effective in motivating both the tutor and learners and encouraging their commitment to pass the levels and acquire literacy certificates.
Moreover, it has helped empower women and provide them with job opportunities. In Hamata, local resident Nagat Mohamed, 21, is one of the participants in the planting of the mangroves, giving her an important role in supporting her community.
Similarly, Karima Saad, 18, has developed a love of agriculture because of the project. She has also benefited from the literacy training programme offered by the project in addition to other activities.
“I have benefited from this project in multiple ways. I have boosted my economic well-being by working in agriculture activities, and I have received additional income for teaching women and girls within the literacy programme,” Amna Eid, a local resident aged 26 and a participant in the project, said.
“The project’s interest in teaching reading and writing to residents is because working in eco-tourism, which the project aims to support, will require this knowledge. At the same time, it faces some challenges, such as choosing the right places for the plantations to avoid any loss in the future owing to coastal development. One way that this can be done is by raising the awareness of local communities about the importance of mangroves.” Abdel-Maqsoud said.
According to Abdallah Al-Kot, an agricultural engineer working on the project, the mangrove plantations are divided into two phases. There is the seeds phase, when seeds are collected during flowering time in March, and then there is the planting phase in April, when the mangroves are planted in polybags in nurseries to increase the germination potential of the seeds.
After a year, the seeds have developed into seedlings that can be transplanted to appropriate zones of the seashore. These zones are chosen in close collaboration with the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), the Nature Conservation Sector, and the local nature reserves.
“There are challenges when the nurseries are a long way from the plantation areas, meaning that transport can be hectic. We also need to check the quality of the seeds and choose the appropriate dates for planting them to avoid tides as it makes the process harder,” Al-Kot said.
“It takes about 20 years to see significant results and until the mangroves become mature and well-established. The project aims to plant 50,000 seedlings and create a first line of defence for the Red Sea coast using mangroves.”
Nihad Mahmoud, a project officer, said that the project aims to develop two eco-businesses around the mangroves to benefit the local community. The first is the Mangrove Ecotourism Project, which consists of boat tours around the mangroves, bird watching, and a Bedouin tent experience. The mangrove boat tours will take place on the west coast of the Red Sea and will help tourists coming to the Wadi Al-Gemal Nature Reserve to enjoy the natural beauty and see the birdlife surrounding the mangroves.
“The team started community training on the management of the eco-tourism project to help local people to manage the project and distribute revenues equally among community members,” Mahmoud said.
“The community training includes simple project management, cash flow and records management, pollution prevention and waste management, and safety practices for all the associated project activities. The ecotourism project will hire around 20 direct and indirect workers, all from the local community.”
EGYPTIAN MANGROVES
According to the UN cultural and scientific agency UNESCO, Egypt had total mangrove forest coverage to a land area ratio of at least 5.1 km2 in 2022 and is a special country for mangrove geography.
There are no mangroves along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast because of low winter temperatures. They occur in the milder climate of the Red Sea and consist mostly of the Avicennio marina and Rhizophora mucronate varieties.
“In the Sinai, notably in the Nabq Nature Reserve, a rare phenomenon has been observed: supra-tidal mangroves. These are growing on sandy hummocks just above the inter-tidal zone, hardly ever inundated by tidal waters. They are believed to have a lateral supply of shallow groundwater provided by the sea,” UNESCO said.
According to the UNEP, mangroves account for less than one per cent of the cover of global tropical forests, but they provide critical ecosystem goods and services to the estimated 2.4 billion people living within 100 km of the coasts.
“Mangroves provide protection against storms, erosion, and flooding, sources of food and timber, improved water quality and carbon sequestration. Mangrove forests also provide natural habitats for over 1,533 different species, including nursery habitats for many commercially important fish, and they are beneficial to the health of adjacent ecosystems such as coral reefs and seagrass meadows,” it said.
UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature report for 2023 found that restoration projects, like that of mangroves, could absorb investment of up to $177 billion worldwide per year by 2030. Mangrove restoration projects could contribute to a global nature-based solutions push that would deliver $4 trillion for businesses and over 100 million new jobs by 2030.
At the UN Climate Change Conference the COP27 held in Egypt in November 2022, a groundbreaking initiative, the Mangrove Breakthrough, emerged. Led by the UN’s Climate Champions and the Global Mangrove Alliance, this gained momentum throughout 2023, securing the backing of 50 governments by the following year’s COP28.
This ambitious plan unites governments, businesses, and other organisations in a critical mission: to safeguard one of Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems.
By 2030, the Mangrove Breakthrough aims to secure over 15 million hectares of mangroves, backed by $4 billion in sustainable funding. The initiative is fuelled by efforts aligned with both the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework.
The Mangrove Breakthrough outlines six guiding principles for those committed to restoring these vital ecosystems. These principles ensure science-based restoration that prioritises both ecological health and the well-being of local communities. From safeguarding biodiversity to utilising best practices and empowering people, the guidelines promote a holistic approach that considers the long-term sustainability of both the mangroves and the communities they support. Mobilising reliable financial resources is crucial for achieving these ambitious goals.
Several governmental and private initiatives have been launched to restore mangroves in other countries in the region. The UAE aims to plant 100 million mangrove trees by 2030, and it also aims for its total area of mangrove forests to reach 483 square km. At the same time, Saudi Arabia aims to plant more than 100 million mangrove trees over the next few years.
Elsewhere in the world, in Indonesia the World Bank is financing a project to support the government in enhancing mangrove management, rehabilitation, and improving livelihood opportunities for coastal communities. The trees extend over an area of about 3.4 million hectares in Indonesia. The country includes more than 20 per cent of the global mangrove area and has 40 out of 54 mangrove species.
The MERS project in Egypt is a model for using natural capital for the economic empowerment of local communities, as well as using nature-based solutions for climate-change adaptation. The increasing challenges of climate change and the decline of biodiversity mean that more projects are needed for mangrove restoration and deriving economic benefits from them.
*This article was written in partnership with InfoNile and with funding from the JRS Biodiversity Foundation and IHE Delft’s Water and Development Partnership Programme. It’s a collaborative effort between the journalist Hadeer Elhadary and the scientist Dr. Yasmine Abdel-Maksoud.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 June, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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