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Catherine Lovelock, The University of Queensland
Conserving and restoringmangrove forests is vital for achiev-
ing the SDGs throughout the coastal regions of the tropics be-
cause of the wide range of ecosystem services they provide.
There are a range of challenges in achieving conservation
and restoration of mangrove forests – some technical, many
are social and economic – but all of the challenges will be
exacerbated by sea level rise, which needs to be incorporated
into conservation and restoration planning for the SDGs. Sea
level rise poses a serious threat to mangrove forests because
although mangrove trees grow in the intertidal and are in-
undated at high tides, they have a limited capacity to survive
prolonged inundation and recruitment of seedlings is limited
when water gets too deep too often. The negative effects of
sea level rise on mangrove forests are not only associated
with rising water levels but also dependent on subsiding land.
The land in many of the world’s largest deltas, where man-
groves support millions of people, is sinking relative to sea
level because of the extraction of oil, gas and groundwater
and because sediment delivery to the coasts, which enriches
mangrove forests adding to their elevation, has been limited
by hydrological modification upstream as rivers are dammed,
water used for irrigation and sediments mined. Degradation
of mangrove forests also increases rates of land subsidence
and their vulnerability to sea level rise. To meet the SDGs, the
attention of a wide range of natural resource managers, from
those that directly manage mangrove forests to those that
manage extraction of underground and sediment resources
and river flows must be engaged to facilitate favourable con-
ditions for mangrove growth. This in turn will limit coastal
erosion, which supports SDGs.