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  The Straits TImes 22 Dec 06
Bringing back the coastal life-savers
Nirmal Ghosh, Thailand Correspondent

BANGKOK - ACROSS the board over the last two years in Asia, there has been a new love affair with mangroves.

Funds are being poured into projects to re-establish mangroves where they once were, or grow more where there are only remnants. Almost every aid organisation and government agency helping communities shattered by the Dec 26, 2004 tsunami has a mangrove plantation component. Scientific conferences on mangroves have multiplied; one was held in Khao Lak, Thailand, in August, and another is coming up in Sri Lanka.

The death of more than 250,000 people in that single catastrophic event opened the door to a new awareness.

In a recent essay for news publication The Economist, Dr M. S. Swaminathan, Unesco's chairman for ecotechnology and a long-time leader of India's green revolution, said the disaster finally brought home to local coastal communities the need for conservation and the value of their mangroves.

Hopefully it is not too little, too late.

Some areas are beyond restoration, and efforts to revive mangroves elsewhere have gone wrong.

The tsunami woke everyone up to the value of the rich and complex coastal ecosystems that people have for years plundered for free wood, charcoal, shrimp, honey, fish and salt - or simply cleared.

Walking among mangroves, the ground beneath the few centimetres of seawater at low tide yields like sponge. The mud, water and organic debris form a primeval ooze, bubbles of air popping the surface. The tough and springy roots of the mangroves form a tangle of barriers that could well stop tanks.

Standing in such a fecund ecosystem, it is easy to understand how and why mangroves developed - as a kind of inter-tidal cradle of life, an environmental filter and buffer between land and sea.

Around 60 per cent of the world's population live within 100km of coasts, and coasts take the sum total of many pressures: urbanisation as well as the accumulated filth of cities and factories which finds its way to the sea.

By the 1990s, almost everywhere one looked, mangroves had either disappeared completely, or were in danger.

Historically, about 75 per cent of all tropical coasts were once occupied by mangroves. Now, about 55 per cent are gone. The Philippines has lost 75 per cent of its mangroves since the 1950s.

At the southern tip of Vietnam in Ca Mau, a 60,000ha tract of mangroves was wiped out by 1992 from a combination of defoliation by American forces during the Vietnam War, extraction of wood, expansion of rice farming, an influx of people and prawn farming.

Thailand lost around half of its mangroves between the 1950s and 1980s. The government banned all extraction of wood from remaining mangroves in 1991 but by then, other pressures developed - in particular, shrimp and prawn farming for lucrative export markets.

Shrimp and prawn farms destroy mangroves by clearing them and releasing effluent which ruin the fine balance of salinity, oxygen content and the regular rise and fall of water level that the ecosystems thrive on.

Six of the world's seven biggest producers and exporters of shrimp and prawn are in Asia: Thailand, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India.

Prawn farming is blamed for nearly 40 per cent of all mangrove loss worldwide.

Calls to save the world's vanishing mangroves received scant attention.

Then, two years ago, an undersea earthquake unleashed the tsunami that crashed into beaches across the Indian Ocean. In some areas, the force was so great the giant waves thundered kilometres inland. Where substantial mangroves occurred, they made a difference absorbing the shock and slowing the flow of the incoming waves.

Mangroves saved human lives. There are no two ways about it, says help agency founder Bodhi Garrett, whose North Andaman Tsunami Relief organisation helps 11 Thai villages devastated by the tsunami.

In one village, part of the settlement was on a sand spit which was wiped off the face of the earth. A short distance inland, several houses situated in a mangrove belt experienced only a rise in water level with no significant destruction.

The Pichavaram mangrove forest in India's Tamil Nadu state slowed down the waves, protecting around 1,700 people in inland hamlets. The Indonesian island of Simeuleu saw a relatively low death toll thanks partly to its mangrove protection.

Some scientists say the case should not be overstated, and point out that where it was at its most ferocious, the tsunami ripped up mangrove forests too. But where the force of the tsunami was not at its most massive, mangroves made a big difference.

At the tiny fishing community on the Thai island of Koh Yao Noi off Krabi, locals told The Straits Times their small belt of mangroves broke the tsunami's force. The surge was under a metre high at their island. They had conserved their mangroves before the disaster, and now they value them even more.

Even on the mainland province of Phang Nga, where thousands were killed, many coastal communities say they were better off because of their mangroves. 'Mangrove belts of up to a couple of 100m made a difference. Most of the communities sheltered by mangrove forests weren't severely impacted,'' said Mr Garrett.

Bangkok-based Somsak Soonthornnawaphap of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources said it is evident now that mangroves saved a lot of lives that terrible day.

Taking a broad view of the new thrust on mangroves, Sri Lanka-based Max Finlayson of the International Water Management Institute noted: 'The key point is that coastal ecosystems, including mangroves, are valuable for many people locally and with effects felt further afield.''

Dr Swaminathan is right, say ecologists, aid organisations, and, most importantly, people living across the tsunami belt. His M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation is based in Tamil Nadu, which suffered enormous devastation in the tsunami.

As he put it in his recent essay: 'For 15 years we have been trying to persuade coastal communities not to destroy mangrove forests, but their livelihood preoccupations did not allow them to heed that request. 'The tsunami miraculously changed that outlook.'

Today, he noted, local folk in Tamil Nadu refer to mangroves as 'life-savers'.
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