The Lesser i691t Heard Save the Mangroves, Part I - Sustainable Planet

Celebrating the One Year Anniversary of the podcast, Jorden and Kimberly turn their attention to...

Celebrating the One Year Anniversary of the podcast, Jorden and Kimberly turn their attention to the amazing, yet underappreciated mangroves forests. Remarkable coastal ecosystems that can capture 5 times more CO2 than rainforests, mangroves provide a powerful defense against climate change and coastal erosion in over 120 countries.
Changing up the format, Sustainable Planet will drop weekly, covering topics in two parts. Part I focuses on the vital role of mangroves, why they’re often overlooked, and the main contributing factors jeopardizing this ecosystem.

Key Topics Jorden and Kimberly discuss include:
Why rainforests get all the glamour while mangroves do the heavier lifting
Just how many amazing attributes this marine ecosystem has
What the biggest threats to mangrove conservation are
How much more money mangrove conservation reaps than deforestation (to the tune of $80,000 per hectare!)
How mangroves affect everyone’s well-being—no matter how long it takes to reach the beach

Recommended Resources
NOAA’s CoastalBlue Carbon assessment and conservation
How mangrove conservation in Acapulco would have mitigated the effects of Hurricane Otis
Mangrove deforestation in Southeast Asia
For those new to carbon trading, a summary and an entire Sustainable Planet episode on the Cap & Trade System by your favorite podcasters
Kimberly’s Substack newsletter post

Episode Transcript

Kimberly
Welcome to our celebratory one -year anniversary episode of
Sustainable Planet. I'm political scientist Kimberly Weir and my co -host is
Jordan Dye, a guy who knows an awful lot about sustainability issues. With
Earth Day approaching, hopefully sustainability is on more people's minds.
Anyone paying attention knows we should save the rainforests. But what about
mangroves, an even more vital ecosystem? But Jordan, I bet you've heard about
mangroves long before I even suggested this topic.

Jorden
I got really excited when you suggested this topic,
Kimberly. And I have a little bit of a long and random story into this, so bear
with me. But my discovery of mangroves started a long time ago with Bjorn
Lumberg and his obsession with the idea of building dikes everywhere to protect
from coastal erosion and rising sea levels. It was an easy solution. And I was
young enough that I was like, well, it sounds reasonable. Like, why are we not
doing this then? And it was the start of a fundamental lesson for me in climate
change, which is if somebody is saying there's a super simple, reasonable way
to fix this massive problem, then everyone has already looked into it because
no one is pas the super simple solutions. And I often think of a quote
from Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, a false but clear and
precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true and
complex. And I think that can be used in so much, but especially here. The
funny thing is, as I looked into dykes and found out that they couldn't be
built around a lot of small developing islands because of either coastline
features or cost, and that they just don't work in a lot of places, it led me
to find out that we already had something that worked, mangroves. And a lot of
our discussion around that is going to be around we don't need to engineer a
new crazy solution. We need to protect and enhance the natural solution that's
doing it so well.

Kimberly
Yeah, instead of destroying it. The thing is, is it
mangroves? This is a topic that I regularly introduced to my classes when I was
teaching introduction to international relations, because it's multifaceted,
right? It's an environmental issue, but it's got economic implications. It's
got human rights implications. It's got environment. Also, it's like, you know,
like health implications. Yeah, I was gonna say world health implications and
also even security implications, right? So across the board, it hit on all of
these international general issues. And I would start out oftentimes the class
by using this. And for the longest time, one or two people would raise their
hands to say they knew what mangroves were before we started talking about them
in class, like almost out of classes of 45 students.
As time has gone on I've seen a little bit more like of an
increase in the number of people who are familiar with them. But generally
speaking, still, it was quite a minority. And so my joke was always, you know,
like they're the less sexy thing. When you think about what's going to make the
calendar for the environmental cause, is it going to be the, you know,
multicolored, awesome looking frogs or birds? Or is it going to be the bland
looking, unless you know what you're looking at, mangroves, mangrove forests?

Jorden
No, exactly. And I think that even amongst a lot of people I
know, you know, other ecosystems such as you mentioned forests already, but
even wetlands tend to get a lot more focus and people know about them. And I
think it reflects a weird view because, I mean, mangroves are found in 121 of
the 195 countries globally. They are pervasive. I mean, their distribution is
concentrated, right? I mean, 40 % of all global mangroves are found in just
four countries, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, and Mexico. It's surprising there's
dispersion and how most countries have an example of them, but people have no
idea about them in their own ecosystems.

Kimberly
Well, and it's their tropical and subtropical forests. So a
lot of times they're not really in, we don't see them nearly as prevalent in
global north countries. It's the global south countries, developing countries,
emerging economies, but the continent of Australia has got a lot of mangroves
too, right? So you sort of see that, but mostly the attention is just, we
hadn't gotten a lot of attention because for example, in the United States,
where a lot of the mangroves were, was Florida. And they were all ripped out
because people wanted long stretches of sandy beaches. They didn't want
mosquitoes, right? All of those things that the reasons why the mangroves are
there are all of the problems Florida is having now in of beach erosion
and having to try to shore up during tropical storms because they've lost that
natural barrier protection. And also just the biodiversity that was just off in
the process of this. And so when it comes to these tropical and subtropical
forests, another thing that goes along with them is the fact that they also
protect the seaweed and the sea grasses and the salty marshes that are in the
same brackish areas, which are also really great because these are carbon
sinks. These are blue carbon areas. And these are so important. We talk about,
everybody hears about. Blue zones for supposedly that these are the healthiest
people in the world where these are in fact blue zones, legitimate blue zones.
These blue carbons, areas that are carbon sinks that capture and sequester
basically and store more CO2 than rainforest do. And that's what really started
to get people's attention in my classes was that they had no idea that these
trap three to five times more CO2 emissions than rainforest do. They'll
reinforce get all the attention.

Jorden
And I think this is actually where you see it reflected in
the scientific literature over the last 15 years. Mangroves have a lot of
attention in the scientific literature because of their recognized importance.
It hasn't translated to the broader public. And on the carbon point, I want to
put this in context for people. So I was trying to find different comparisons.
And I think the best one was in a single square mile of mangroves, they remove
and sequester roughly the same emission as 90 ,000 cars. So when we and I want
to put this in context for, you know, North American audience. So when you're
looking at Florida and the destruction there, this is even finding out. So I
was like, oh, there's 800 square miles of mangroves still left in Florida, very
dispersed and fractured and being lost. And seeing how much of that is what was
there even a decade ago is sad. But let's looking at that 800 square miles that
you have the capacity to annually remove and store the equivalent of 72 million
cars. which is roughly 25 % of America's total commercial and personal vehicle
fleet in what is just remaining. So like the actual carbon impact of these
areas is just massive. And I really like 25 % of all personal and commercial
and enger vehicles. I don't think that there's very few other natural
processes that are in concentrated areas that I can point to that have that
level of impact.

Kimberly
And that's the thing is that. The rainforests got a lot of
attention, and rightly so, because they are also really important. And they
were being deforested, cut down at a breakneck speed rate for the hardwoods
that they harvest and all of the other. There are an awful lot of renewable
resources in rainforests. And as countries were sort of persuaded, and that was
why, you know, 1994, that's why the UNEP had its sustainable development.
meeting in Rio de Janeiro was to draw attention to that, to say, hey, we need
to have more attention because Brazil's rainforest, one of the biggest places
with rainforest was just being cut down at really high rate. And that was
actually turned around and doing really well for a while. And then when
Bolsonaro came in, he reversed everything. But now that Lulu's back in power
again, like that's been reversed again. So it's hopeful again.

Jorden
It's hopeful, but I think it really drives to how short
-term politics can have massive long -term consequences on some of these
issues, right?

Kimberly
Yes, for certain.

Jorden
You mentioned biodiversity. And one of the things that I
thought is the coolest about these, and I got really excited when we were going
to talk about it, is that just by their nature, like the mangroves themselves
represent one of the most interesting forms of biodiversity on the planet
because they are all specialized trees and shrubs. So we're saying mangroves,
which is a broad definition of an ecosystem on brackish water that has
specialized trees and shrubs. In the States, for example, there were four types
primarily of trees and shrubs that exist in mangroves. And why they're so cool
is they have literally evolved processes to deal with that high saline water.
So, you know, some of them filter the salt out before the roots fully absorb
the water. Others actually sweat and excrete the excess salt from their bodies
and through their leaves. And it's just like such an interesting and unique
type of plant life on our planet.

Kimberly
Well, and it's really cool too, because for anyone who has
seen mangroves, they have really long root systems that come up above the soil
or the sand or wherever they're kind of situated. And so they have these really
long root systems. And those are really cool because they're protective areas
then for fish and other things that swim in the sea. Sea life, I guess we can
use that. There's a word for that. So other sea life, right? And also because
of the root system, they provide for all, like we said, you know, you mentioned
too, the grasses and the marsh, like all of those reeds and so forth that grow
along there in that area. Then all of this stuff acts as a filtration system
that really keeps the freshwater separate from the seawater. And that's such an
important thing. When we look at that, the other thing that is just, I think,
so important about, in addition to this, they act as a filtration system. They
trap the sediments and heavy metals and pollutants and so forth. And keeping
that fresh and salt water separate. The thing that really just amazes me that's
so cool is that they, in storing. this carbon like they do it in the sediment
and they do it in the like below and so it's there and and it's going to stay
there and they are always continuing to suck up more and more and more and
unlike in forests where you see like the trees die or there are forest fires
and other natural causes or the town whatever in this instance like they just
continue to keep storing that and doing that indefinitely unless you start
ripping them out. And that's where we lose, not just it has that dually awful
environmental repercussion of losing the thing that's actually sucking up the
carbon as well as releasing everything that had been stored back into the
atmosphere. And so that's bad news.

Jorden
A hundred percent. I think it's really key to focus on there
for a second that the natural process of how it stores is much more in that
root system. So again, there's smaller trees and shrubs. So what we see above
ground is normally always in of size, the root network is going to be
bigger. But in the mangrove case, in of actual volume, right, a material
where in natural more boreal forests or tropical forests. A lot of that carbon,
excuse me, is stored in the actual trunks and the actual tree mass above
ground. So when those die off and through natural processes release more back
and create, I think, more of a fluctuation. Whereas to your point, this is eons
that this can be stored in if it maintains a healthy habitat.

Kimberly
Yes. And the thing is, is that when you want to create
beaches or something, though, or if you're digging up for farming, like is
what's going on, especially with Indonesia and Malaysia and other places,
Brazil too. For palm oil production, they have to necessarily, in order to
monocrop the palm oil trees, the date palm trees, they have to actually then
uproot the whole system as well. And that's what's really bad, which is why
it's also so much worse and so much more important to protect because the consequences
are so much worse because all of that stored carbon is being released in a way
that... As you just described, that's not the case if you're just cutting where
the tree is storing most of it above ground.

Jorden
Exactly. You know, we've hit on you think about what is lost
there, right? In the destruction of a mangrove and the carbon, the biodiversity
and the entire. So you think about the fishing communities are and we're going
to go into this more later. But it's taking that out doesn't just lose one
thing. And a lot of these issues, you know, we know are interconnected and we
highlight that. But we can point out this is the big aspect of this. And I
think mangroves are so interesting because as you said, you told your students.
They have such big factors that are like such big benefits across multiple
categories. It's not just a loss on one. And so one of the ones going back to
my example of how I got into this is the storm barriers and that coastal
defense. And I wanted to hit through there's really there's four ways that
mangroves really drive coastal defense for, you know, shorelines. And that's
across waves. So I found some really interesting stats here because they've
broken this out for policymakers. So mangroves reduce wave height from by 13 to
66 percent per 100 meter of mangrove. So one of the things that's going to come
out here right away is the depth of those mangroves is really, really
important. So, again, 100 meters between 13 and 66 percent height reduction. 1
,000 meters of mangroves needed for storm surge protection, which reduce
between 5 to 50 centimeters of the height of the storm surge per kilometer. So
now you're thinking about these damages from climate change on the coastal
systems because we're putting them right up against it and taking out these
natural barriers. And one of the ones that I think it gets a lot of attention
when it happens is tsunamis. And I found it interesting that per 100 meters of
mangroves, tsunami flood depth is reduced by 5 to 30 percent. So just massive
benefits. And across all of these benefits are done at a far lower cost by
protecting these than building out in the places it would work, massive
engineered dike systems. And then at the ultimate side, it's the erosion. Those
roots we've been talking about allow the sediment to be trapped and stay there.
And with the removal of the mangroves, you start losing your coastlines even
faster and facing greater acceleration. It's just it's crazy to me. It actually
is crazy when you start talking about this. Well,

Kimberly
it ties into two things that we've talked about before. One
is sand because we talked about sand depletion. Right. And even though. This
sort of sand isn't necessarily exactly the same sort of sand we talked about
for construction. There is still this aspect of sand demand where there is
coastline erosion. And that sand, every community that has beaches is trying to
shore that up somehow and try to replace that sand. It's coming from somewhere
because this other sand is being washed out, right? And even if they're going
off the coast and doing it, I mean, this is way out of my depth, but I mean, I
guess an appropriate pun here because you go out to the depths. Then you're
uprooting and dredging to bring sand in. You're uprooting the whole ecosystem
there, right? And causing lots of more effluents and particle particulates in
the water. So there's that. But also the other thing too, is what we talked
about in the episode with extreme weather. And we continue to see this. And
most recently with the earthquakes in Burma, Myanmar and Thailand, but with
lots of flooding that's going on and lots of... hurricanes and extreme weather
patterns, that this coastal defense is so important because we see more people
flocking to these areas. But now they're going there because they want beaches.
And yet that whole natural defense is gone, which could be there and actually
really help to decrease the impact. But instead of adding more mangroves in, we
end up saying, oh, but I want to be able to walk on the beach and not be bitten
by mosquitoes.

Jorden
It's the ultimate irony of removing something for a
disappearing beach, essentially, that you're going to enjoy for a generation or
two before it's wiped out anyways. And to your point, you could have enjoyed
your coastline. You could have enjoyed all the benefits if we had just
strengthened those protections.

Kimberly
Well, and we are the privileged people, right? Because most
of the places where these mangroves are and these coastlines are, are
developing countries. And they are trying to improve their livelihoods. They're
trying to make ends meet. And so unless they have a good incentive to protect
and conserve the mangroves, they're going to use those for those resources. And
even if they're renewable resources, if they're borrowing into the future and
overusing them, they're still going to end up contributing to deforestation of
them and depletion of them.

Jorden
Exactly. I think it's another great tie back to our sand
episode, you know, with the disappearing river in Kerala in India, right, where
they were dredging and removing sand for a short term economic gain that was
entirely reasonable, but in the long run ended up costing them all more to have
water brought in after the destruction of the river and the complete loss of
that economic gain. So it is like in a lot of these, especially in developing
countries, it's that short term economic pressure, which produces entirely
reasonable outcomes. If you think about it from their perspective. but are
separated from the long -term costs and consequences.

Kimberly
Well, that would be like us, you know, anyone coming, it's
always the do as we say, not as we did, right? For the United States, Canada,
global North countries, especially ones that were colonizers and going out and
exploiting these resources. And the people who are in these places are still
doing exactly the same thing, basically. Because they produce cash crops for
them, or they produce hardwoods for them, or because they don't have any other
ways to make money because they've never owned the means of production. And so
then that means that they are still making boats out of the wood. I mean, this
is good wood that floats. That's what mangrove trees are. Of course, they're
going to be buoyant. And so using those and using them for firewood and stuff,
because that's their economic reality.

Jorden
No, exactly. And, you know, in a lot of cases, because we
extracted so much of the value that they couldn't move up the value chain of
economics. Right. And so this gets to one of my favorite area of economics,
though, because there's so much work now on trying to quantify the actual
ecosystem service benefits to the economy so that we can show, you know,
countries and communities. wait, no, here is the money that's generated for
your economy from keeping this and that you're not seeing because no one's paying
for that service and no one's being charged for it. And so when I looked at the
2022 systemic review of ecosystem service literatures on mangroves, and they
had a wide range that ranged from 2 ,700 USD per hectare up to 80 ,000 USD per
hectare of mangrove and ecosystem service benefits. That range really depended
on the amount of ecosystem services included in the review. I mean, Kimberly, I
really only touched on five. Some of these reviews looked at a total of 27 to
32 ecosystem services connected to mangroves. So that's how essential they are.
When I was trying to find what's a better one that we could give people to
think about as a mental placeholder, the National Institute of Health in
America uses an average of 21 ,000 USD per hectare. And that's in line with an
average from a number of other studies I looked at. So when we're thinking
about this again, 21 and that's an annual ecosystem service benefit. So you
think about that for every hectare lost, you have to essentially. And no one's
doing it. But you'd have to pay $21 ,000 on average in most places to replace
the benefits to water, to land. And in a lot of cases, you can't actually even
do it. This is a way of economists of trying to quantify that. But you can't go
back in and put in water filtration systems on the coast to do that for the
plants, right?

Kimberly
Well, and like you just talked about, to try to do it with
dams and dykes and stuff. And that's certainly way more expensive. And it's
certainly not nearly as environmentally friendly. And also, I mean, these are
these externalities that we talk about every single episode that don't get
quantified, that don't get included in. And here are the real costs that we're
talking about. The World Bank valued it at approximately $50 ,000 for those who
don't do hectares. Two and a half acres is a hectare.
We're talking about livelihoods that actually through
conservation could help the people whose resources were exploited and also
promote sustainable development in the process and facilitate this. And so we
need to do this because we all, everyone on the planet is at risk. And this was
always one of the things that I would always say to my, you know, ask my
students. Do you think that this, you know, here we are in the middle of, you
know, Kentucky, the tri -state area, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, do you, are you
affected by mangroves? And we would talk about this and I would always put it
as an exam question then. And invariably, some people would still say, no, I'm
not affected by this. And I was like, where were you when we were talking about
this? Because how can you have sat through our whole discussion on the myriad
ways that, that. Having mangroves, whether they're on your own, you know, in
your own backyard or whether they're content in a way that they don't have an
impact on your daily life. And they do because we see things like rising sea
levels and the impact of that. And so with rising sea levels. We're not only
losing mangroves, not only to deforestation, but because of the rising sea
level. So they're, they're actually under threat from that. And the sad irony
is that their conservation can actually help to stop this. And if we don't stop
the, you know, protect the mangroves, then we're going to have more, but the
mangroves are going to disappear. And that, that sort of catch 22. And so with
rising sea levels, yeah. Okay. So, well, oh, here we are in the middle of the
country like you, you know, in the middle of Canada. And why? So what? How are
we going to be affected by that? Well, what about migration? You've got climate
migration is a real thing. And so if you have people screaming about putting up
borders and blocking out immigrants, then here's one more thing that's going to
continue to contribute to that factor.
Jorden
Well, and at a simple level. Even if, you know, the most
self -centered person who still believes in climate change, we'll use them as
my example here, even for them, right? That I live in the middle of Canada. I
live on a hill, you know, with no tornadoes, nothing. I'm good and I have my
net zero house. Why do I care? It's the carbon at the end of the day. For every
carbon sink that we lose on this planet, humans are going to have to reduce
more emissions more rapidly to make up for that. So if you are the most self
-centered climate activist in the world, which most aren't, it still
dramatically affects what you will have to do in your lifetime to lose these
amazing ecosystems.

Kimberly
Right. Because right there, we're talking about with climate
change, rising temperatures, dropping temperatures, extreme weather. It doesn't
matter where you live, you're going to end up being affected by it.

Jorden
And so before we dived into the drivers of the risks, I want
to do a little level setting for everybody on the state of it, right? Because
we've been talking about this just generally. So a couple important things that
really helped contextualize this for me is that 20 to 30 % of global mangroves
are already lost in the last 50 years. So everything that we're talking about
today as totals is off of a 30 % reduction already, excuse me. And then looking
forward, another 50 % of those remaining mangroves are at risk of collapse by
2050. And one of the things I struggle with in climate is everybody always
talking about 2050 and saying how far away it feels, right? But again, that's
really only 24 years away, right? And when we think that COVID already started five
years ago,

Kimberly
when we think that COVID already started five years ago,
that that was the lockdown was five years. Five years ago does not feel like
that long ago.

Jorden
No, exactly. So these things, these dates that sound far off
give a false sense of hope. So again, 50 % at risk by 2050. And diving in, 20 %
of all global mangroves are in the critically endangered and endangered
categories, like the cusp of actually collapsing. And so I just wanted to,
like, that's what we're talking about. This is an ecosystem around the globe
threatened, and a lot of it is on the edge as we go through some of these
issues. I will in transparency, the only nice thing is that the rate of mangrove
loss has halved over the last 30 years. So I think that's one area that humans
are. And then to your point of the attention rising, I think that you can
really track rising attention to mangroves and their benefits to that reduction
in damage.

Kimberly
And but so then when you start. Going through all of the
whole list here of why they're at risk, in addition to rising sea levels,
right? We've got the obvious one, deforestation. None of these are mutually
exclusive because you look at that and say, oh, well, it's caused by these
various other things. But in and of itself, the mangroves are depleted at three
to five times faster than what tropical forests are. And yet they're only 0 .4
% of the overall forest area of the entire world. So we're looking at a
minuscule amount of area. And yet it's going at a really high speed, even
though it has been, you know, the brakes have been put on. And so, again, you
know, that deforestation is that they're no longer there to process the
emissions, the mangroves and the plants that the mangroves that protect. But
then it releases all that CO2 back in that had been sequestered. So that's
hugely problematic. But the deforestation is happening because of tourism.
Right. We talked about already with beaches and. marinas and people who want to
do water sports and so forth and want to be able to enjoy that without all of
the biodiversity that comes along with the mangroves, like the mosquitoes, of
course, are always going to be the number one.

Jorden
People and mosquitoes. Yes. I mean, I'm from northern Canada
originally. Trust me, they can drive you insane, but that's not a reason to cut
anything down. And thinking about the impact of there, 62 % of that global loss
of mangroves between 2000 and 2016 was driven by land use changes on both the
deforestation for growth on one side. but also, as you mentioned, tourism and
aquaculture on the other side. And so going back to my coastal defense, kind of
talking about that, you know, everybody should think about how we're cutting
the width down in two ways, right? The inland pressures on deforestation for
wood, for harvesting, for cropland, and then the ocean side pressure. on the
mangroves from wanting more tourist opportunities and aquaculture and they do interesting
things like again because you need that depth to get those benefits you're
either letting more of the ocean surge on to land in the first place or you're
reducing its actual ability to stop it before it hits you know important
infrastructure on the other side so that's how I started thinking about some of
these losses

Kimberly
Yeah. And so because of the commercial pressures through
like aquaculture, that's a big and growing industry. Shrimp farming. I
being in Thailand and seeing the shrimp farming and just areas they were
clearing to be able to do that. And tuna ranching is actually a thing, too. And
and these are really rough on the environment because they're in such small and
it's like livestock, you know, factory farming for fish in these little tiny
areas that are really concentrated with a lot of waste and so forth. And then
also added to the fact that they're depleting the mangroves that actually
could, if they were in place, help to deal with some of these issues caused by
aquaculture. So that can be done in a sustainable way. It absolutely can. But
because of the front financing and the pressures to produce more at a quicker
rate at a lower overhead and race to the bottom, that's less likely to happen.
The other big factor, especially because Indonesia has the largest set of
mangrove acreage, hectareage, whatever you want to say, in the world is because
of palm oil production. And in the 1990s, 2000s, I think it was mid -2000s when
the USDA decided, banned trans fatty acids in processed foods. That was when we
saw this huge, I forgot exactly when the year was, so don't quote me on that.
Like somewhere between the mid -90s and the mid -2000s, right? Like we see this
huge shift in demand for palm oil. And because of that, there was just a huge
shift in places where it was already coming from. Indonesia and Malaysia are
the biggest producers in the world. Now suddenly it's like, oh, we're going to
monocrop this. And I flying over Borneo and just seeing whole areas
that had been. tropical jungle tropical rainforest area and we're just
literally row after row after row of mangrove and the only roads that were
there were the roads that were connecting to the different like owned farms
basically and so i mean everybody's heard of of that for sure in the orangutans
and all of the other wildlife that's been displaced because of that and so so
we see this this Increased demand for palm oil. Again, like I'm the average
person here. How am I having not just being affected by, but how am I having an
impact on what's going on also in the world? In this case, then it's like,
well, if you don't want to pay for fairly trade, ethically sourced palm oil,
then you're contributing to the factor and you're going to in turn then be
affected by the fact that there are fewer mangroves.

Jorden
Exactly. And as we mentioned in our Halloween episode,
getting into some of the chocolate things, it's actually an area of looking for
chocolate that either doesn't use palm oil as an additive or uses ethically
sourced. And, you know, it's funny on the aquaculture and shrimping because I
think in true sustainable planet fashion, I made a giant asterisk and said and
have in all caps, we need to do an episode on this. Right.

Kimberly
Right.

Jorden
Because it is it is mind boggling. I like that you mentioned
that it can be done sustainably and I kind of. I wanted to talk as a second as
we're talking about these impacts that are driving the losses, you can actually
think about how having mangroves around would actually reduce the impacts of
these drivers, right? So tourism, you know, it's a narrow focus on just beaches
and marinas because what they actually lose out on from losing the mangroves is
coral reef protection and marine life. So if your tourism, if you have a dead
beach at the end of the day that has no underwater activity and is lifeless,
that's going to dry up your tourism, right? So it's a short -term trade -off
when not realizing that actually the longer -term, more sustainable from a financial
and actual enjoyment sense involves those mangroves. And similarly in the
aquaculture, because one of the big problems is that these shrimp pens are
temporary. So they end up cutting down this massive section of mangroves,
building temporary pens, over farming it. And then they think, oh, we'll take
them down and we do it in a new area. But nothing grows back because of that
accumulated bio waste turns the area toxic. And now and again, a more natural,
less intensive method that was actually used around the mangroves and use them
for their benefit of that toxin filtering can produce a more sustainable
system. And that's for each of these. It's like taking them away makes it
worse. Right. drives further loss. And it's just sad.

Kimberly
Yeah. And when we look at pollution, the biggest waste where
this is happening also too, is from the aqua farming and obviously the tourism
and the things we've mentioned, but also from industrial waste because
industrial waste then is polluting the mangrove areas because the industries
are, you know, like they're not, they don't need the beach, whatever, but
they're still protected by these mangroves, but that industrial waste is going
out and it's also causing these dead zones. And so, That is also contributing
to the depletion of the mangroves. And we also have the soil erosion from that
deforestation. So we've got lots of dead zones being created from these various
activities that happen and either are when the mangroves have been cut down or
they could still be standing and they're still being depleted.

Jorden
And this is this is something that made me like, you know,
we'll get I do have hope for the end of the episode, everyone. But one of the
things that made me sad about this is that even though, as I said, the rate of
loss is declining, has not hit zero, we're still losing roughly six percent of
glow or zero point six, almost a full percent of global mangroves per year. But
even as we change that, right, and we and we drive that down. The damage we've
already caused and the drivers of climate change are increasing the natural,
like up till now, natural loss of mangroves has been the lower factor. But
there's worry that as we've reached tipping points and then as we go forward,
that even though humans might now try to pull back and desperately try to save
them, the natural drivers will continue that loss. And there's this sad climate
irony of our, you know, we finally woken up and now we want to save it. I think
that in life, we pretend there's always time to fix things. And in certain
cases, there might not be.

Kimberly
Yeah. And with this, we see the rising global temperatures.
We see the increased spread of disease, the decreased availability from
nutrition and fishing and the people who are dependent on that in these coastal
areas who are typically poorer people to begin with. And we see the people who
are fishing have to go out further to get the fish. And that puts them at an
added disadvantage to be able to do that. We look at the global implications of
deforestation and pollution and displaced persons and degrading habitats and
migration due to insecurity. We look at these environmental, economic, health
and security implications of the lack of mangrove conservation makes us, you
know, really think we hope it's not too late to be able to do this.

Jorden
No, exactly. And the concentration really drives the problem
here, right? Climate migration in general, depending on what factor you're
looking at, can be very dispersed. So like not hot spots, because that's what
really drives major problems. But when looking at like sea level rise, loss of
mangroves, and then the migration that will be triggered from that, you know,
one study put it at about 3 % of the global population by 2100. But when you
dive down into that, it's 100 % of the population in a number of countries,
right? So like that smaller global number hides the fact that we're talking
about mass migration problems out of a concentrated area and then typically
into a neighboring region. Which, as we've already seen in the 21st century,
drives massive, massive internal issues and stabilization. So some of these
times we think about this as a climate issue or we frame it as that. And I
often wonder if we leaned more on the national security and the global
stability angle, would people get a little bit more concerned and wake up to
some of this?

Kimberly
And that's why I mentioned that, because climate migration
is a real thing within, in place, displaced internally. as well as, right, so
we see more crowding of cities and pressure on cities and then mass
urbanization. And then we see what that does if you don't have a sustainable
city. The other side of that is crossing borders and also battles over
resources. And so we see actual civil wars and conflicts within regions and
within countries, but across borders for these things. So with that, we're
going to try something new with this episode. celebrating our one year
anniversary of sustainable planet. And we decided that we're going to break our
episode into two parts. So if you enjoyed part one, great. Part two of our
mangroves episode will drop next Thursday. So until then, you can let us know
how you feel about this, right? This would be the opportune time to do that.
Email us at splanetpod at gmail .com. I promise you that one of us will respond
to you. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. If you want
to see show notes from today, look at the website. I will also give you some
additional resources and you can check our data twice. You can read more on my
Substack posts and we'd really appreciate if you take time to rate and review
our Sustainable Planet podcast that we have for you. Thanks for listening and
have a sustainable day and happy Earth Day.

The Lesser-Heard Save the Mangroves, Part I 5ot72