<
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/02/pakistan-bucks-global-trend-with-30-year-mangrove-expansion/>
"KARACHI — His sandaled feet drenched in black mud, Rashid Rasheed points to
one of the mangrove nurseries he’s been looking after for the past few years.
With wooden walls topped by green netting, a dozen nurseries shelter thousands
of saplings.
Rasheed, a researcher and nursery expert with the government of Balochistan
province in Pakistan, has been leading a drive to establish nurseries in the
coastal town of Dam. The goal is to expand and enhance the town’s scattered
patches of natural mangrove forest, which have shriveled due to human
activities.
“These nurseries have 50,000 saplings that are ready to be transported to the
creeks for planting” Rasheed tells Mongabay.
Rasheed’s work is part of a five-year project initiated in 2019 by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences’ South China Sea Institute of Oceanography that has planted
mangroves on 16 hectares (40 acres) at Dam, and at other sites in Balochistan
and neighboring Sindh province.
It’s one of many projects aiming to restore Pakistan’s mangroves. These
semiaquatic trees offer a host of benefits, such as protecting coasts against
storms and rising sea levels, providing habitat for fish, birds, and other
wildlife, sequestering carbon better than most other ecosystems on Earth, and
sustaining the livelihoods of some 120 million people globally, according to
the IUCN.
Around the world, mangrove forests have undergone a decades-long decline that’s
just now slowing to a halt. But Pakistan bucks this trend. The country’s
mangroves expanded from 48,331 hectares in 1986 to 143,930 hectares in 2020
(119,430 to 355,659 acres), a nearly threefold increase, according to a 2022
analysis of satellite data. “It is because of the constant endeavor by
government and NGOs,” the analysis states, citing restoration, research, and
awareness-raising campaigns “now being religiously carried out to conserve and
regrow mangroves” by local, national and foreign bodies. Fishing communities,
who depend on mangroves for fuel, shelter and as fish nurseries, are often key
to the success of Pakistan’s mangrove restoration, providing the labor for
planting and protection.
Many in Pakistan are looking to mangroves to bolster precious fish stocks and
defend against the effects of climate change — even as threats to mangroves,
such as wood harvesting and camel grazing, continue with no end in sight."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/goodnews-meals-brazil-rewild-denmark-mangroves-pakistan/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
