Mangroves

This guide by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) seeks to assist countries and communities to take steps towards making marine and coastal ecosystem-based management operational, from strategic planning to on-site implementation. An important aim of this guide is to facilitate the implementation of UNEP’s overarching Ecosystem Management Programme and new Marine and Coastal Strategy in countries and regions in line with its Medium Term Strategy 2010-13.Read More

This report by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai deals with the study on the neglect and virtual turning of the river Mithi in Mumbai into a sewer. The river, along with its estuarine reach, provides the much-needed green lungs to the city in the form of mangroves. Neglect of this river was the main cause of the catastrophic floods in Mumbai on 26 July, 2005, which claimed nearly 1,000 lives. In what could be a monumental urban transformation initiative to be undertaken anywhere in India yet, ORF has proposed a grand vision for the reclamation of Mithi River. The study report and a documentary film ’Making the sewer a river again - Why Mumbai must reclaim its Mithi’ on the dreadful conditions of the river, was released in May, 2011 in Mumbai.

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This climate adaptation report by World Wildlife Fund India captures its experience on climate change in the Sundarbans. Beginning in 2005, WWF-India has conducted dozens of personal interviews to record how climate change impacts people's lives here and now. These perceptions demanded that scientific studies be carried out to ascertain the veracity of the claims.

The report draws heavily from the studies undertaken by the School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University at the micro-level as well as across the Indian Sundarbans. These studies made it possible to design initiatives that enhance risk preparedness as well as adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities that ensure physical and livelihood security, and reduce sensitivity in case of exposure to high intensity weather events. Not all of these were successful, for example, attempts to raise mangrove plantation. The successful ones are briefly described in the last chapter of the report.

The eco-region that forms the Sundarbans is both unique, and uniquely fragile. Unique because it is one of the most extensive mangrove forests in the world, existing in a vast deltaic region where freshwater and seawater mix. Also unique, because the human population that exists on the fringes of the coastal forest, in land that has been slowly adapted to cultivation over the last two centuries, confront challenges from both land, air, and sea that few other local populations have to contend with. And further unique, because the flora of the Sundarbans, the mangrove, presents a natural buffer, a bulwark against coastal erosion and seawater ingress into one of the most densely populated regions of the world. Ironically, the Sundarbans' fragility stems from its uniqueness.

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This article in the Public Library of Science deals with the state of knowledge of coastal and marine biodiversity of Indian Ocean countries. The Indian Ocean extends over 30 per cent of the global ocean area and is rimmed by 36 littoral and 11 hinterland nations sustaining about 30 per cent of the world’s population. The landlocked character of the ocean along its northern boundary and the resultant seasonally reversing wind and sea surface circulation patterns are features unique to the Indian Ocean.

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