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On a cloudy, humid day last month, 250people gathered near the beach in thesmall Indonesian village of Kajhu.

Local and international officials gave speeches,and some of the villagers performed a tradi-tional dance ceremony. Then, everyone car-ried shovels and buckets along a gravel roadpast a flattened area of the beach littered withbroken tree stumps. The buckets held tinymangrove and Casuarina pine seedlings,which the villagers tucked into shallowtrenches they dug at the water’s edge.

Kajhu village is in the province of Aceh onSumatra — the area most brutally devastatedby last year’s tsunami. Of the approximately300,000 killed on 26 December 2004, morethan 130,000 were from Aceh. The Kajhu ceremony was a small act of hope in the wakeof tragedy. The replanting marked the launchof the Green Coast Programme, a plan drawnup by non-profit groups, international donorsand the Indonesian government. The projectis one of many across southeast Asia that aimsto replace mangrove forests destroyed by thetsunami and by human industry.

Mangroves have been disappearing fromsoutheast Asian coastlines for decades,replaced by vast shrimp farms and touristresorts. In the five countries hit hardest by thetsunami, development eliminated 1.5 millionhectares of mangroves between 1980 and 2000— 26% of the region’s mangrove cover1. Butthe devastation wrought by the tsunami hasinspired governments to try to restore theseecosystems, which environmental scientistsand economists have long said are naturaldefences against storm damage.

Mangrove restoration is notoriously diffi-cult, however, and these replanting projectsface huge challenges. Past restoration projectshave planted the wrong species in the wrongplaces, scientists say. And the projects havetended to ignore, alienate or exploit the peopleliving closest to the mangrove forests. “Localcommunities must have more of a say in thecontrol, use and protection of mangroves,”

says Ed Barbier, an environmental economistat the University of Wyoming in Laramie.Otherwise, future restoration projects will suf-fer the same fate as past ones — and fail to haveany lasting results.

Boom and bustThe problem, says Alfredo Quarto, director ofthe Mangrove Action Project, Port Angeles,Washington, is that “mangrove areas areremote, usually public lands, available to leaseby corrupt officials”. Poor fishers and farmersrarely have any land rights and cannot preventmangroves being cleared for shrimp ponds.“The people who enforce the laws don’t live inthese areas and can be convinced by someonewith money to turn their backs on the destruc-tion,” Quarto says. When the farms collapse,

due to disease or contamination, a wealthyowner can move on to another stretch of virgincoast, leaving a useless waste site behind2.

Shrimp farms create temporary jobs, but theboom-and-bust cycle hurts villages more thanit helps. Healthy mangroves are nurseries forfish, crabs and other creatures that mature inthe ocean. So eliminating the mangroves cutsoff a source of food and income.

Mangrove deforestation compounded theeffects of the tsunami. After the wave passed,villagers reported that areas with more man-grove cover suffered less damage. These anec-dotal reports have been bolstered by analysisof satellite images taken before and after thetsunami. This October, internationalresearchers coordinated by the Nordic Agencyfor Development and Ecology in Copenhagen,

ROOTS OFRECOVERYReplanting coastal forestsdestroyed by last December’stsunami sounds like a goodidea — especially if theyprotect against future storms.But such plans need nurturingif they are to succeed, Erika Check discovers.

Green shield: workers near Banda Aceh plant mangroves in the hope of protecting their coastline.B.

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Denmark, reported that areas with mangroveor tree cover were significantly less likely tohave experienced major tsunami damage3.

The authors caution that vegetation doesnot prevent the worst devastation, but they seea protective role for plants in reducing damagefrom regular storms, such as the typhoons thatbatter the Philippines every year. These find-ings supported the locals’ perceptions thatmangroves are natural barriers, says Vaith-ilingam Selvam of the M. S. SwaminathanResearch Foundation in Chennai, India. “Itused to take us years to convince people thatmangroves are worth saving,” Selvam says.“Now it is much easier, because people seethem as a bioshield.”

Many southeast Asian governments havenow pledged their support for mangroverestoration. Malaysia has promised $25 mil-lion to replace 4,000 hectares of mangroveslost to the storm and to development. Indo-nesia has pledged $22 million for mangroves,and has already planted 300,000 seedlings nearthe city of Banda Aceh. The Thai governmenthas expressed its support for mangroverestoration and coastal rebuilding. In India,the government of the southern state of Keralahas pledged $8 million to supplement an existing programme to restore mangrovesdestroyed by cyclones. International donorgroups also offered money and seedlings, andseveral meetings were set up to coordinate therestoration projects.

Shifting groundHow likely are these projects to succeed? Manyof the seedlings planted on the Aceh coast ear-lier this year have already died, because theywere planted too soon and in the wrong places,say scientists working in the region. “Some-times the site selection was not so good, andthere was still debris from the tsunami wash-ing up that destroyed the seedlings,” says FaizalParish, an ecologist and director of the GlobalEnvironment Centre in Selangor, Malaysia.And the paid contractors had no reason tocontinue caring for the young, fragile shoots.

Getting it right is slower and more difficult,say the groups with long-term experience ofmangrove restoration in Asia. The WetlandsInternational Indonesia Programme (WIIP),based in Bogor, Java, has been running projectssince 1998. The group coordinates replantingprojects by negotiating agreements with villages. The villagers commit to plant a certainnumber of seedlings they collect from the wild.In return, the programme provides supportstaff and a loan that the villagers can use to startbusinesses, such as chicken and goat farms.

If 70% of the seedlings are still alive after fiveyears, the village keeps the money; otherwiseit must repay part of the loan. NyomanSuryadiputra, a wetlands ecologist and tech-nical director of WIIP, says this encourages villagers both to plant and care for the forests,making them more likely to survive. So far, villagers have replanted 350 hectares of land

along 3.5 kilometres of Indonesian coastthrough these arrangements.

But rebuilding after the tsunami has beenmore challenging, Suryadiputra says, and cov-ers a wider area. Some of the group’s currentactivities focus on the Aceh coast, includingthe project in Kajhu. But the group has alsobegun work on Simeulue Island, 300 kmsouthwest of Banda Aceh, which was ham-mered by the tsunami and its aftershocks.

Before the disaster, Wetlands Internationalestimated that Simeulue Island had at least1,000 hectares of mangrove swamps. But thetsunami — plus another earthquake that fol-lowed this March — lifted parts of the islandby 1–2 metres, cutting off mangroves andcoral reefs from the tidal waters that sustainthem. And the islanders have been so devas-tated by these disasters that — understand-ably — planting trees is not their first priority.“Many of the people are still traumatized,”Suryadiputra says.

So the group first had to convince Simeulue

residents that planting trees would restoresome of their lost livelihoods. This summer,staff member Eko Budi Priyanto persuadedvillagers in Langi, on Simeulue Island, to planta nursery of 5,000 Calophyllum tree seedlingsgrown from seeds they collected on the beach.Building the nursery brought the villagetogether, as entire families pitched in to help.The seedlings are now about a metre tall andhave just been planted, Suryadiputra says. “It’sbeen a really big challenge, and I don’t want to say our approach will be successful,” he says. “We want to do this properly from thebeginning, and that’s not easy.”

Gathering stormThe time and effort involved in community-based programmes makes them harder to exe-cute, but those with experience say approachesthat involve local people are the only ones that make sense. In three states in India, whereSelvam works, 33 villages have worked withforestry officials to restore 1,500 hectares ofmangroves since 1993. So far, three-quarters of the seedlings have survived, Selvam says,double that of other techniques. The commu-nities saw the benefits of their work when thetrees buffered the impact of the tsunami, saysSelvam, who is trying to enlist new villages inrestoration projects.

The question is whether commitments torestoration will last longer than one year afterthe tsunami. Already, there are signs that gov-ernments and developers are returning totheir old ways. In Indonesia, despite officialsupport for buffer zones, shrimp farmsdestroyed in the tsunami are being rebuiltwithout setting aside space for trees. In somecases, says Parish, the Indonesian governmenthas given newly damaged coastal land todevelopers, to create new shrimp farms.“These are strong pressures, as they werebefore,” says Parish.

In many cases, local people are unhappyabout these new developments, but they lackinfluence with government officials. This isthe situation facing poor communities every-where, not just in areas hit by the tsunami, saysJurgenne Primavera, a marine biologist at the Southeast Asian Fisheries DevelopmentCenter in Iloilo, the Philippines. “The peoplewho are at risk are poor, so they can’t lobby thegovernment to put protective greenbelts in the places where they live,” says Primavera.The result in Indonesia, notes Parish, is that“the initial sensible plan to have some sort ofgreenbelt along the coast has not advanced asmuch as it could have.”

The next storm in Kajhu is unlikely to be atsunami, but without healthy mangroves itcould still be devastating. ■

Erika Check is Nature’s Washingtonbiomedical correspondent.

1. Food and Agriculture Organization State of the World’sForests (FAO, Rome, 2003).

2. Naylor, R. L. et al. Science 282, 883 (1998).3. Danielsen, F. et al. Science 310, 643 (2005).

Mucking in: involving local people is one of thekeys to a successful restoration project.

Under threat: southeast Asia has lost a quarter ofits mangrove forest in the past 20 years.

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