| Publisher | The Nature Conservancy, Berlin |
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| Total Pages | 44 pages |
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| PDF Link | nature.org/
GlobalMangrovesRiskReductionTechnicalReport |
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| DOI | 10.7291/V9DV1H2S |
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| Publication Date | May 2018 |
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| Abstract | Coastal development and climate change are significantly increasing the risks of flooding, erosion, and extreme weather events for millions
of vulnerable people, important infrastructure, and trade. Coastal ecosystems, particularly mangroves, reduce risk by protecting coastlines against erosion, flooding, and sea level rise and by providing ecosystem services that reduce communities’ vulnerability to hazards. Mangroves reduce exposure to coastal hazards by reducing wave heights and retaining sediments, decreasing the impacts of flooding and erosion and protecting coasts during storms. These natural defenses also provide a wide suite of ecosystem services- including food, livelihoods, carbon sequestration and climate regulation, that reduce the vulnerability of coastal communities to disasters and extreme events, thereby increasing coastal resilience.
Mangroves can be managed as natural coastal
infrastructure to reduce coastal risks. And unlike
most built coastal infrastructure, mangroves adapt
and keep pace with environmental change, and
they are substantially less costly to maintain.
But mangroves are being lost at an alarming rate, in
part because we have not adequately valued these
natural defenses. Conventional approaches to
measuring wealth focus only on built capital; many
critical goods and services, such as flood protection, which rely on keeping ecosystems intact, are
rarely valued. This lack of consideration encourages short-term over-exploitation and degradation. Better valuations of the protection services of coastal habitats can ensure that these services are accounted for in policy and management decisions, halting the loss of our natural capital and ensuring the provision of critical ecosystem services.
This report uses rigorous hydrodynamic and
economic models to value the coastal flood protection services of mangroves globally, and identifies
the places where mangroves provide the greatest
risk reduction benefits to people and property.
This work applies the Expected Damage Function approach, commonly used in engineering and insurance sectors and recommended for the
assessment of coastal protection services from
habitats, where the protection benefits provided
by mangroves are assessed as the flood damages
avoided by keeping mangroves in place. This work
combines findings on flood exposure reduction
from mangroves with vulnerability scores from the
WorldRiskReport and Index to produce a ranking
of countries that receive the greatest risk reduction
benefits from mangroves relative to their vulnerability. The results are presented in terms of the number of people and the value of property flooded with and without mangroves.
These results demonstrate that mangrove conservation and restoration can be an important part of the solution for reducing the risks of coastal communities. This valuation can inform strategies for adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and environmental management, and can help identify sustainable and cost-effective approaches for risk reduction. |
Created: 9/7/2018 4:00 PM (ET)
Modified: 9/7/2018 4:00 PM (ET)