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 passing up 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 terms 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