Across 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 essential in India’s pursuit of local weather resilience, biodiversity conservation, and the empowerment of coastal communities.
However, in the face of city enlargement, local weather change, and improvement, how are India’s mangroves surviving — and who’s defending them?
Mangroves matter
Mangrove swamps are forested wetlands characterised by timber that can tolerate saline water. They function pure boundaries, defending coastal communities from cyclones, tidal surges, and erosion. During pure disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and recurring cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, mangroves have been recognized to attenuate harm to coastal infrastructure and biodiversity and have saved hundreds of lives.
Their function in biodiversity conservation is important as effectively. Mangroves present breeding and nursery grounds for fish, crustaceans, molluscs, and migratory birds. These salt-tolerant forests additionally retailer important 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.
Yet they’re more and more threatened by city enlargement, aquaculture, air pollution, and altering local weather patterns. This isn’t the case in India alone: round the world, greater than half of all mangrove ecosystems are liable to collapse by 2050, in accordance to a latest report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
In spite of those mounting threats, nonetheless, India can also be the epicentre of a rising variety of inspiring efforts to defend and revive mangrove ecosystems. With the correct mix of stewardship, scientific assist, and coverage consideration, they’re displaying that mangroves can’t solely survive: they can thrive.
Mangroves in Tamil Nadu
In latest years, efforts to restore mangroves throughout Tamil Nadu have seen outstanding progress, pushed by a mixture of presidency initiatives, neighborhood participation, and scientific planning. Once severely degraded by shrimp farming, industrial air pollution, and altered hydrology, the State’s estuaries and coasts are immediately witnessing a gradual however regular comeback.
Under the Green Tamil Nadu Mission and different coastal restoration programmes, the districts of Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, and Cuddalore amongst others have considerably expanded mangrove cowl. As a consequence, Tamil Nadu practically 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 Research Foundation in Chennai in collaboration with native village committees and the Tamil Nadu Forest Department started a undertaking to restore 115 hectares of degraded mangroves in the Pattuvanachi estuary of Muthupettai. After thorough web site assessments and neighborhood engagement, the workforce dug 19 main canals to restore 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.
Yet one other success story from Tamil Nadu is the restoration of a inexperienced belt of mangroves close to Buckingham Canal in Kazhipattur in Chennai. Under the Green Tamil Nadu Mission, the Forest Department planted 12,500 mangrove seedlings from 5 species in 2024 with the assist of scientific consultants. The restoration concerned eradicating invasive Prosopis juliflora weeds earlier than planting the mangroves, with the aim of restoring Chennai’s pure defend towards cyclones and storm surges.
Conservation in Mumbai
In early 2025, Amazon’s Right Now Climate Fund partnered with Hasten Regeneration and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to launch a $1.2 million (Rs 10.3 crore as on July 24, 2025) restoration undertaking alongside Thane Creek in Mumbai, geared toward reviving important mangrove forests and mudflats that assist migratory flamingos and greater than 180 different fowl species.
The undertaking mixed ecological restoration with city cleanup: biodegradable boundaries known as trash booms had been put in to intercept plastic air pollution, concentrating on the assortment of at the least 150 tonnes of plastic over three years. Simultaneously, the initiative has deliberate to plant about 3.75 lakh mangrove saplings, creating new habitat for flamingos and empowering native communities, particularly girls, by offering paid employment in planting and upkeep actions.
By focusing each on ecological restoration and socio-economic resilience, this undertaking 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 change into a nationwide chief in mangrove restoration below the Indian authorities’s Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes scheme, which was launched on World Environment Day 2023.
Under 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 aim 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 targets.
Gujarat is already residence to 23.6% of India’s mangrove cowl and at the moment an instance of how sturdy planning and strategic coastal mapping can assist shortly upscale restoration efforts.
These tales from India’s coastal communities present us that mangrove conservation is not only attainable however truly effectively underway. Such tales of hope should change into the norm, not the exception.
As local weather change and rampant developmental actions proceed to ravage our coasts, the want to defend what stays and restore what’s misplaced has by no means been extra pressing. Mangroves are the first line of defence towards storms, and so they additionally shelter fisheries and retailer carbon.
Priya Ranganathan is a doctoral scholar and researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru.
