Sahel Region Learning to Reap the Benefits of Shade

February 17, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Joe Hitchon

WASHINGTON, Feb 14 (IPS) – In Africa’s Sahel region, agroforestry techniques using traditional plantings known as “fertiliser trees” to increase soil fertility, as well as harvesting and grazing regulations, are offering new solutions to both food and human security.Such approaches were nearly lost in recent decades following devastating droughts in the Sahel. Now they are making a belated but welcome comeback. According to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey, “regeneration agroforestry” in the Sahel stands at over 5 million hectares of agricultural fields newly covered by trees – and growing.

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Recurring droughts destroyed many harvests in the Sahel. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

“Agroforestry is the future of agriculture in the drylands and sub-humid regions,” Chris Reij, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS. “In southern Niger, for instance, farmers have improved millions of hectares of land through regenerating and multiplying valuable trees whose roots already lay beneath their land.”

The effect for local communities over the past 20 years has been immediate and staggering—”more than 500,000 additional tonnes of food per year,” Reij said.

Collectively known as “evergreen agriculture”, these techniques have not only been changing landscapes and breathing new life into soils long depleted of their nutrients and productivity, but also affecting political and social realities.

The ideas behind evergreen agriculture began during the 1980s, in the midst of a severe and prolonged period of drought in the Sahel. This period was disastrous for the region’s inhabitants as crop production plummeted and vast numbers of livestock had to be killed off.

The region’s trees also began to disappear, since local communities were forced to offset their lost assets through practises that slowly destroyed the forests – the only profitable resource left in the Sahel. These communities resorted to cutting and selling wood to buy food and survive, with multiple effects of this deforestation felt in the intervening decades.

For eons, farmers in the Sahel grew trees on their farmlands because they acted as a natural fertiliser. Not only did they improve fertility by adding nitrogen to the soil; they also offered a critical shading effect, which improves moisture conditions in both the local atmosphere and the soil.

Buffering crops of maize sorghum and millet below them, the trees used by farmers in the Sahel are unique and known as Faidherbia albida. According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the tree exhibits the unusual characteristics of becoming dormant and leafless in the wet season – when crops are growing – but leafing out thereafter, when farmers can harvest the trees’ leaves and pods for fodder for their livestock.

When scientists began looking more closely at this phenomenon, they discovered a virtual underground ecosystem in these areas, with root systems and perennials from various species of valuable indigenous trees, which farmers can now cultivate.

These trees grow naturally each year, and with the grazing of livestock managed to give the trees time to grow, the landscape is being transformed, with the implications of this growth possibly extending beyond food security.

Regenerating security

Africa’s “drylands”, the vast swath of the Sahara Desert stretching across North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, have risen in the past year to the top of the global agenda. The insurgency in Mali and the ensuing French military intervention have received the most attention recently, following kidnappings in Algeria and wars in Mauritania and Niger.

“If you look at the dimensions of where terrorism and political insecurity are most acute, throughout the entire globe, it is a map of the drylands of Africa and West Asia,” Dennis Garrity, U.N. Drylands Ambassador and director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, said at a recent event here in Washington.

“The situation emphasises how fragile the underlying development pathways are under conditions of extremely low literacy, health and other human development indicators in the drylands.”

While the Sahel suffers from both an accelerated degradation of land and low rates of female literacy, these two indicators aren’t generally conflated. Yet according to Garrity, a connection can be found in factors such as high population growth rates.

According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the population in the Sahel doubles every 20 years, a rate that is reflected in the rapidly declining size of farm plots on which rural communities depend for food. Meanwhile, availability of new farmland is rapidly dropping, and studies regularly report a steady decline in soil fertility.

Above all looms the long-term prospect of the region’s vulnerability to climate change, making these agroforestry initiatives all the more urgent. Garrity and other experts warn climate change will play out in terms of more extreme droughts – higher temperatures and low and uncertain rainfall – that will significantly affect crop yields.

“It is not a military or security problem,” said Garrity. “There is a pressing confluence of food insecurity, economic insecurity and a big lag in human development indicators that emphasises that this is a multidimensional problem.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Development, Environment, Report Tagged With: , ,

ECUADOR: Water Management Transcends "Public or Private" Debate

March 22, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Gonzalo Ortiz *

QUITO, Mar 22, 2011 (Tierramérica) – For one day, civil servants are trading their desks for the chilly highland plains in a rural community 3,500 metres above sea level on the outskirts of the Ecuadorian capital, where they are helping to plant native trees.

Since last November, employees of the state-owned power company, Empresa Eléctrica Quito, have been taking turns to participate in the planting of 10,000 polylepis trees, as part of an agreement with the Quito Water Protection Fund (FONAG).

The polylepis tree, which is native to the Andes mountain range and has a trunk composed of multiple thin layers that resemble paper, is the only timber-yielding tree that grows in this high-altitude area. Planting polylepis trees will help improve the retention of water in a vital river basin.

In addition to planting trees, "we are trying to raise the awareness of the state functionaries and to demonstrate to the indigenous communities that the people from the city really are working together with them to preserve sources of water," FONAG director Pablo Lloret explained to Tierramérica.

Initiatives like these contribute to the success of FONAG, a trust fund financed with both public and private moneys, whose aims include participatory water management, increasing public awareness, and the development of a mathematical model to define the factors that impact on the basin of the Guayllabamba River, which flows from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean.

The Upper Guayllabamba River Basin, located between 5,893 metres and 1,000 metres above sea level, provides water to two million inhabitants of Quito and another 570,000 people in the northern province of Pichincha, as well as supplying irrigation water for smallholders and exporters of flowers and horticultural crops.

It is one of the most densely populated areas of Ecuador, which means it is most heavily affected by the problems of competition over water usage and serious water pollution stemming either from direct causes or as a result of scarcity, according to the FONAG website.

Less than one percent of wastewater in Quito is treated before it is discharged into the Machángara, Monjas and San Pedro Rivers (San Pedro is the name given to the upper stretch of the Guayllabamba).

"The heart of FONAG is the water management programme, and its two arms are the policy and technical branches," said Lloret. This has led to the establishment of the Guayllabamba Basin Management Board, conceived as a governance system that includes all users.

Over the last four years, with the cooperation of the French Institute for Development Research (IRD), a mathematical model of the watershed has been developed. "Today we can simulate what would happen to the water balance if there is a change in any component of supply or demand," IRD representative Bernard Francou told Tierramérica.

Concern over rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation worldwide has led the United Nations to devote this World Water Day, Mar. 22, to the theme of "Water for Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge".

FONAG was created in 2000 with initial funding of 21,000 dollars and currently holds 9.5 million dollars. Only the yields of the trust are used to finance its operations, and administrative costs cannot exceed 20 percent of the funds invested in projects.

The leading contributor to the fund is the Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Agua Potable y Saneamiento (EPMAPS) of Quito, the public water and sanitation authority, which turns over one percent of its billing to the trust, around 190,000 dollars a month. Other contributors include the city power company, U.S.-based conservationist organisation The Nature Conservancy, the Ecuadorian mineral water company Tesalia Springs, and the Cervecería Nacional brewery, owned by the U.K. corporation SABMiller.

The FONAG model has been replicated in nine other provinces of Ecuador, as well as in Colombia and Peru, while similar initiatives are being developed in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.

Yet when it was first created, "it was nothing but a bank account where a few funds were deposited" and almost disappeared, recalled Juan Neira, the general manager of EPMAPS between 2000 and 2009.

It was not until 2004, when a number of organisations joined together "and the water company decided to donate one percent of its billing to the trust fund, that FONAG was able to get organised, hire staff and undertake projects," Neira told Tierramérica. In addition to the simplicity of its functioning, another of the fund’s strong points is its transparency, stressed Jorge Ribera, former operations manager of the Quito water authority. "All of the partners audit the trust, and the results can be seen immediately," he told Tierramérica.

In pursuit of its educational goals, FONAG joined forces with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) last year to undertake the "Dissemination and Sensitisation Strategy for the Care and Protection of Freshwater and Saltwater Ecosystems – From the Highlands to the Mangroves", which includes radio spots, bus advertisements and workshops.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Environment, Latin America, Report Tagged With: , , ,

ETHIOPIA: They Have Become Farmers of Trees

November 20, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Omer Redi *

KAFA, Ethiopia, Nov 19, 2010 (IPS/IFEJ) – They have spent the better part of their lives destroying the forest, but Kochito Gabre and his cohort are now the guardians of a UNESCO-recognised resource in the Ethiopian highlands. After shrinking to barely half its original size, the Kafa Forest is now a model for sustainable use in the country.

Home to over half of Ethiopia’s remaining afromontane forest and the centre of origin for the wild coffee arabica, Kafa is a dense tangle of forest, bamboo thickets and wetlands 475 kilometres southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa.

Annual rainfall here is over 2,400 mm and the area is watered by three major rivers, the Gojeb, Dinchia and Woshi. More than 100 plant species have been recorded here, and the forest teems with wildlife. Monkeys and gelada baboons can be seen along the roads, and locals say troops of these animals can destroy a farm in a single night.

Slash and burn gives way

Decades of deforestation by smallholder farmers as well as large state and privately-owned farms destroyed 43 percent of the Kafa rainforest.

"Farmers in this area use extensive and shifting cultivation making forest protection very challenging," said Terefe Weldegabriel, soil, water development and conservation expert at the Kafa Agriculture Office. 

Routine clearing of new farmland, the cutting down of trees for charcoal, fuel wood and timber; and expanding commercial farms threatened the forest in Kafa as in the rest of Ethiopia, leaving vast areas parched, dry and unable to sustain farmers.

But to visit 50-year-old Kochito’s farm today is to step into a different vision for the future. Push through tall grass to walk among rows of coffee, avocado, and enset trees (a "false banana" tree grown for its edible roots).

Kochito is the head of a local Participatory Forest Management group, which manages 1,200 hectares of forest. There are 60 PFMs in Kafa. Their members harvest honey, spices and wild coffee in the protected forest and grow coffee, cardamoms, long pepper (piper longum) and fruit in agro-forestry schemes on their own farms in buffer zones around the forest.

"Just last year, I harvested 150 kilos of honey, 200 kg of coffee and spices from the deep forest, while producing fruits, coffee and other crops from my own farm," Kochito said.

When they grew cereals, wild animals would frequently destroy an entire crop leaving families with nothing; their new crops are less vulnerable to animals.

Lessons took root

Kochito got his start with agro-forestry and sustainable harvesting of non-wood forest resources thanks to the efforts of Farm Africa, a UK charity that worked in Kafa between 1998 and 2004.

The community took the lessons from Farmoch, as locals called the charity, to heart.

"The forest is source of life for us. But we didn’t realize we were destroying it so badly. We just focused on our own needs and expanding our farms until Farmoch educated us," Kochito told IPS.

The successful registration of more than 750,000 hectares as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in June 2010 will help to consolidate sustainable use of the forest.

Biosphere Reserves are areas designated under UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme to test approaches to integrated management of natural resources and biodiversity.

"That our forest is recognised in the world is a motivation for us," Kochito said.

The registered area is divided into three zones – a Core Zone, undisturbed forest that has always enjoyed a measure of protection by communities as sacred places; a Buffer Zone, in which locals practice various kinds of farming without harming the significant forest cover that remains; and a Transition Zone, land already stripped of trees, and occupied by farmers growing cereal crops and mechanised farms such as coffee and tea estates.

Sustainable future

Kafa officials hope the recognition of the forest will enable products from the area, especially coffee, to fetch higher prices if they are recognised as sustainable forest products.

People like Kochito are the key implementers of the Man and Biosphere Programme’s principles, protecting the forest and rehabilitating degraded areas. The Berlin-based Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), which was instrumental in applying for Biosphere Reserve status, has committed to assisting the locals.

"We have now secured 3.1 million Euros from the German Ministry of Environment and Nuclear Safety to implement a number of projects in this area," said NABU’s Kafa project coordinator Mesfin Tekle.

The funding will support projects on sustainable coffee management, reforestation of 10,000 hectares, and distribution of 10,000 improved stoves as well as forest and climate change monitoring.

But there are still challenges that endanger Kafa forests; deforestation is still going on by individuals and mainly by commercial farms licensed by the government, the agriculture ministry’s Terefe told IPS.

"We want UNESCO to support us beyond just registering the area as Biosphere Reserve. We are now preparing document detailing the kind of support we want and what we plan to do," he said.

The local administration has developed a plan for reforestation, construction of roads, health and education facilities as well as farms protection through soil protection, agro-forestry, apiculture and value addition in the degraded Transition Zone.

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by Inter Press Service (IPS), CGIAR/Biodiversity International, International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), and the United Nations Environment Program/Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP/CBD) — all members of COM+, the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Development, Environment, Report Tagged With: ,

ETHIOPIA: First Carbon Finance Spreads Green Over Highland

November 10, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Omer Redi *

ADDIS ABABA, Nov 9, 2010 (IPS/IFEJ) – It has been decades since the people of the Humbo Woreda have been self-sufficient in food. A Clean Development Mechanism project – Ethiopia’s first – centred on the reforestation of the plateau at the heart of the district, is restoring the local environment – and sustainable livelihoods along with it.

The Humbo plateau, some 400 kilometres south of Ethiopia’s capital, is in the most densely populated part of Ethiopia. It’s a dry and dusty district that has experienced frequent drought; average rainfall is 800-900 mm and temperatures routinely rise to 40 degrees. The stripping of trees has made the low-lying areas susceptible to flooding.

But a Clean Development Mechanism project initiated by international development organisation World Vision has organised 40,000 people in the worst-affected areas to regenerate and protect 2,700 hectares of forest land. The CDM project will bring in at least $726,000 over the next ten years, in addition to permitting the sustainable harvesting of trees from 2020.

Damaging the forest

"Constant cutting for fuel wood, charcoal, grazing and clearing trees for farm lands completely destroyed the forest," said Beyene Adebo, a farmer in Humbo.

This turned Humbo’s once dense forest into arid, barren land, especially after the 1984 famine in Ethiopia – when people turned to cutting trees down as a source of income after their farms failed to produce.

"Following this, drought and famine became common. The rains disappeared and we couldn’t harvest as much from our land as we used to," Beyene added.

Two decades of rehabilitation efforts by World Vision Ethioipia (WVE) – water supply, food assistance, health, agriculture and environmental projects – failed to permanently address the problems of the drought-prone region.

The seven worst-affected kebeles (Ethiopia’s smallest administrative unit) suffered from aridity, erosion, soil infertility and depleted levels of groundwater.

"The biggest challenge was that after all those investments, we could not see significant changes in these villages vulnerable to drought," said Hailu Tefera, head of WVE’s Climate Change Programmes department.

Restoring cover

Working with two colleagues, Assefa Tofu and the Australian Tony Rinaudo, Haile developed the Humbo Community-based Natural Regeneration Project.

A technique known as Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration, perfected in Niger in the 1980s, is at the centre of the regeneration project. FMNR relies wherever possible on nurturing the shoots that spring back from the stumps left after the indigenous tree cover is cut down.

Typically the living stumps will put out anywhere from 10 to 50 stems that farmers traditionally cut down when preparing their fields. Nurturing these instead has rapidly – and cheaply – restored tree cover in Humbo. Only about a tenth of the plateau was so badly degraded that seedlings had to be brought in from elsewhere.

From the project’s inception in 2006, funds from World Vision have supported farmers’ efforts to make a living without further harming the trees. Farmers raise livestock and poultry, as well as produce vegetables and grain. Those with no viable land got skills training in things like tailoring.

The demand for charcoal and fuel wood has been reduced by the use of thousands of energy-saving stoves provided by WVE.

Before the project’s launch, the plateau formally belonged to no one, contributing to its degradation.

"So we discussed with the villagers as well as local and regional administrations where we agreed to divide the plateau among the seven kebeles that surround the site and reforest it with community ownership," Hailu told IPS.

The 4,200 aid-dependent families, registered under the seven Forestry Development and Protection Cooperatives, are entitled to harvest grass for animal fodder from the reforested areas, as well as fuel wood from pruned branches in the forest now protected by the community.

Dramatic success

The plateau is now totally covered with native trees, some of them as high as 1.5 metres. The rehabilitated forest was registered in December 2009 as an Afforestation Reforestation Project after it was validated by JACO CDM, accredited validators.

Its carbon stock was assessed at 7,000 tonnes and the World Bank purchased a first carbon credit in October 2010 for $34,000.

Beyene is coordinator of one of the seven cooperatives. His group has 839 members and is responsible for 1,000 hectares of the forest.

"We have seen good results and hope to see more," he said.

He said that after decades of disappointment, farms in Humbo have in the past two years begun to produce better harvests.

"This has led to an attitude change towards the forest, bringing back our forefathers’ culture of protecting trees," Beyene added.

Benefits return to project

Money from the carbon credit scheme will be divided among cooperatives in proportion to the share of the forest they look after. The money will be spent on the project and community development priorities.

The World Bank has committed to buying $726,000 worth of carbon credits over the next decade at a fixed price of four dollars per tonne of stored CO2.

"This is part our effort, as international development agency, to reduce the carbon footprint in the world," Edward Dwumfour, Senior Natural Resource and Environment Management Specialist at World Bank, told IPS.

"We use the money we received from developed countries and private firms in these countries, who are also the emitters, to buy this carbon credit." 

World Vision is searching for additional buyers in the voluntary carbon market to earn further income.

* This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by IPS, CGIAR/Biodiversity International, IFEJ and UNEP/CBD, members of Communicators for Sustainable Development (http://www.complusalliance.org)

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Development, Environment, Report Tagged With: , ,

CHINA: Great Green Wall Rises, But Questions Remain

September 23, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Mitch Moxley *

BEIJING, Sep 23, 2010 (IPS) – Dubbed "The Great Green Wall," a human-made ecological barrier designed to stop rapidly encroaching deserts and combat climate change is coming up across China. By 2050, the artificial forest is to stretch 400 million hectares – covering more than 42 percent of China’s landmass.

China already has the largest human-made forest in the world, covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, and the Communist Party this year announced it had reached its stated goal of 20 percent forest cover by 2010. The government envisions a line of trees stretching 4,480 km from Xinjiang province in the far west to Heilongjiang province in the east.

The project began in 1978, and three years later the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, passed a resolution to make it the duty of every citizen above age 11 to plant at least three Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch or other saplings every year.

Ordinary citizens have planted some 56 billion trees across China in the last decade, according to government statistics. In 2009 alone, China planted 5.88 million hectares of forest. Former U. S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has said China plants two and a half times more trees every year than the rest of the world combined. He called the endeavour "the largest tree-planting programme the world has ever seen."

The reforestation programme is part of a multi-pronged effort by China to combat climate change.

In 2007, China surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, and emissions are expected to grow as China’s economy does. China has invested heavily in clean technology and has pledged to close thousands of heavy- polluting factories, but it has also faced criticism from other countries for moving too slowly and failing to agree to international standards.

The benefits of reforestation, advocates say, are evident. Notably, the trees help stop China’s fast-moving deserts in the west and north. In a 2006 report to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, China declared that 2.63 million square km – or 27 percent of its landmass – was covered with desert, compared with 18 percent in 1994. China’s grasslands have shrunk by 15,000 square km annually since the early 1980s.

Moreover, China’s forestry scientists say the new forests are better at absorbing carbon than slow-growth forests (of which China has virtually none remaining). They argue that fast-growing poplar and white birch trees capture perhaps double the amount of carbon as Korean pine, larch and firs.

The government is increasingly using the Great Green Wall as a propaganda tool to trumpet its efforts combating climate change. Every spring, about three million Communist Party members, civil servants and model workers head to the countryside to plant trees in a massive propaganda event.

In April, President Hu Jintao planted trees in Beijing to mark the city’s 26th annual voluntary tree planting. Some two million people joined Hu in that planting exercise, according to the state’s ‘People’s Daily’ newspaper.

But doubts remain about the impact of this green campaign.

While the government stresses the forests’ importance in combating decades of environmental damage, some critics say the type of forests planted, and their location, limit their effectiveness. They argue that the Great Green Wall has contributed to a significant decline in China’s forest quality. In many of the newly planted forests, few animals thrive, some experts explain.

Jiang Gaoming, professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Botany and vice secretary-general of the China Society of Biological Conservation, said the Great Green Wall has, in some places, accelerated ecological degeneration by putting pressure on precious water resources in arid and semi-arid regions.

Jiang also said that trees planted during the Great Green Wall project are non-native. "Native trees actually play a much bigger role in preventing desertification," he told IPS.

In a study released in May, scientists from the University of Oklahoma and Fudan University in Shanghai found that reforestation and afforestation – the creation of new forests – actually lowers a forest’s potential to lessen climate change.

The study found that areas where natural forests are replaced by reforestation – called plantations – do not actually help control carbon emissions, and that converting farmland to forests decreases the amount of carbon absorbed by the soil.

Authors of the study also said that converted soil also loses 80 percent of its capability to degrade methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more heat than carbon dioxide.

Jiang Fengguo, director at the Soil and Water Conservation Supervision Station in Hexigtan Banner, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, told IPS that the Great Green Wall has had some success slowing the encroaching desert.

But he worries about the Great Green Wall’s influence on the local biological chain, including its impact on animal species. Moreover, Jiang said, the Great Green Wall may not be enough. "There will still be problems. Desertification still exists, and the continuing deterioration of the ecological environment has not been reversed," he said.

* This IPS story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network http://www.cdkn.org

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Environment, Featured Tagged With: ,

THAILAND: Coastal Folk Flex Collective Muscle to Restore Mangroves

October 13, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Ron Corben

SAMUT PRAKARN, Thailand, Oct 13  (IPS)  – Looking across the bay while at a restaurant built on stilts over water, Bonchai Chayapat muses over the transformed landscape once lush with a mangrove forest that today has all but vanished.

”The land in this … coastal area (of) about 2,735 rai (1,094 acres) used to be (mangrove) forest. But now it’s all gone,” said the 53-year-old resident of Bangkhunthein district.

Kongsak Lerkngam, 52, casts the same forlorn glances at the spectacle of vanishing mangroves.

As a small boy, the headman of the Klong Pittayalong Community would wend his way through the mangrove forests to the seas. Today those are gone.

There may yet be hope for the return of these mangroves, or some of them anyway.

The non-governmental Kok Klam Conservation group is working together with six local communities in this province, located at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, to regenerate nearby coastal mangroves – which are shrubs or trees that grow on shallow waters.

The sight of these community workers crouching down in the mud near the shoreline village as they press the roots of young mangrove seedlings into the grey soil inspires hope for the environment.

Each sapling, a metre in height, is tethered to a short bamboo pole for support – a crucial part of an effort to restore the plants that reclaim the land from the sea.

Just beyond the shoreline stand lines of four-metre bamboo poles, or fence-like structures that act as water breakers to stem the impact of wave erosion on the new saplings.

Mangroves forests play a key role in stabilising shorelines, trapping sediment and bolstering the shore. Scientists say that without them, the shoreline is easily exposed to the constant forces of the wind, waves and currents.

Narin Boonruam, who heads the conservation group, is spearheading the effort to protect 15,000 rai – some 6,000 acres – that have been lost to the sea along the coastline.

Narin said a muddy environment is necessary for the saplings to take root. He believes the collective efforts of the communities and his group toward the restoration of mangroves are not enough. ”Government should do more to help,” he said.

”I would hope the government paid more attention to this kind of work to help protect the coastal resources more and more, and be supportive of local communities,” he said.

Kongsak said the government should urgently act to protect the coastline in the province, saying it was a key producer of agriculture and seafood for Bangkok. ”We have not had success yet; we have to keep on going, or the government will no longer listen to us,” he said.

Here on the Gulf of Thailand – a wide stretch of water bordered by the provinces of Samut Sakorn and Samut Prakarn and located just two hours from Bangkok – communities have been paying a bitter price for Thailand’s drive toward rapid economic growth three decades ago.

The lure of growth led to the destruction of large swathes of mangrove forest, the vital protection against sea encroachment, to make way for shrimp farms.

Janaka de Silva, an environmental scientist and program coordinator with the environmental advocate International Union for the Conservation of Nature, said that in the rush to growth, few considered the wider impact on the environment.

”In the heydays of economic growth and that push to actually grow fast, there was an increase in development in coastal areas that was not planned in a systematic and organised way,” Dr De Silva said.

The result led to changes in society, including environmental damage, that were little understood at the time. ”Now we see the consequences of those decisions that were made 25 or 30 years ago, almost,” he told IPS.

The affected coastal communities are already experiencing what many scientists have been warning about since the advent of global climate change that has triggered rising sea levels.

Dr de Silva said such changes place enormous pressure on local communities. Coastal people, he added, are constantly struggling to adapt to live ”in what we see as a very dynamic environment that’s changing and being influenced by many different forces.”

Mangrove forests are to be found in more than 20 coastal provinces in Thailand, covering an area of 240,000 hectares as of 2002. These forests used to cover 368,000 ha in Thailand in 1961. The steady loss of mangroves has been attributed to timber and charcoal industries as well as urbanisation, agriculture, and aquaculture, particularly shrimp farming.

The World Bank, in a 2007 report on the state of Thailand’s environment, warned that the coastline was being eroded at a rate of one to five metres a year, leading to an annual loss of an area equivalent to two square kilometres. The estimated loss in economic terms back then was at least six billion baht (150 million U.S. dollars).

The Bank also noted that over the past 30 years, erosion and subsidence have led to the village’s shoreline diminishing by more than one km.

As though heeding the calls of conservationists, the Thai government has made some progress in the recent years to halt the loss of mangroves. In 2004 it launched a five-year ‘Action Plan for Mangrove Management in the Gulf of Thailand’ to rehabilitate the mangroves along the coastline.

But more needs to be done.

Pinsak Surasavadi, the director of the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources, which currently oversees some 600,000 acres of coastal mangrove area in the country, said that while the level of mangrove cover is stable and ”even increasing, 40 percent is still not in good condition,” including those which remain in shrimp farm areas.

Success at increasing the mangroves comes only after halting erosion. ”If we can stop the erosion first, then we can increase the sediment layers – (and) that’s the time we can plant,” he said.

The province of Prachuap Khirikhan, 280 km south of Bangkok, has seen the restoration of 225 acres of land that was once left desolate by shrimp farming.

Nowadays, lush 15-metre tall mangrove trees have highlighted the success of the regeneration program, bringing with them an abundance of wildlife.  The project, backed by major state power companies, has also been endorsed by the Thai Royal family.

Dr Pitiwong Tantichodok, a specialist in coastal oceanography, said the recognition of the role of mangroves as a critical component of the marine and coastal environment has marked a new way of appreciating the role of nature.

”Now we are turning into the period we call ecosystem-based management. . . .  if we keep or maintain the ecosystem … the ecosystem will be healthy, and you can harvest in a sustainable way,” he assured.

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