From local planting to national plan, Belize bets on mangrove recovery

GALES POINT, Belize — On a narrow stretch of shoreline across from the Gales Point cemetery, Jamal Galves and the rest of the team from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute Belize unload crates of mangrove seedlings and bamboo from the back of a pickup truck.

Gales Point, a small Creole village, lies along a thin finger of land surrounded on three sides by a massive lagoon, part of Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary in central Belize. Over the past few decades, the peninsula has suffered from massive erosion, due to a combination of hurricanes, sea-level rise and mangrove clearance. At this spot, the land is only a few meters wide.

“I’m from this community, I know where the mangroves were in the past, so I recognized that something had to be done,” says Galves, the program coordinator for Clearwater in Belize.

Usually Galves is here working on Antillean manatees (Trichechus manatus manatus), which thrive in the lagoon’s brackish waters. On cool mornings they congregate around warm underground springs, making soft whishing noises as they stick their nostrils above the water to take a breath. Researchers from Clearwater have been monitoring these manatees for decades. But today Galves is here for mangroves.

“Instead of putting in major infrastructures like a seawall, which they don’t have the financial ability to do, we’re trying to fight this issue with a green response,” he says.

Across Belize, grassroots projects like this are trying to restore mangroves to prevent erosion, boost biodiversity and fisheries, and more.

Over the past three years, Galves and his team have been planting mangroves at Gales Point using a variation of what’s known as the Riley Encasement Method, where seedlings are planted within protective structures like PVC pipes. The method is used on coasts where there are a lot of waves or storms.

“The first year we planted, we didn’t have as much success. But as we’ve gone through it, we’ve seen where the issues were, and formulated a plan that works,” Galves says.

The conservationists harvest the seedlings from other parts of the lagoon where they’re more plentiful, then put them in an in-situ nursery for a few months until they’re established.

The latest batch is now ready to be planted, and students from the nearby primary school have come out to help. They use mallets to pound cut lengths of bamboo into the sand, then put a seedling in the hollow of each tube. The idea is that the mangroves’ roots will hold onto the soil and “stop the sand washing away from the land,” says one of the students. Once the planting is finished, Galves’s team puts up signs with information on the importance of mangroves.

To date, the Clearwater team, in conjunction with the community, has planted more than 6,000 mangrove seedlings in Gales Point.

A national restoration plan

Belize has more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of coastline, with mangroves still covering 88.6%, or 53,000 hectares (131,000 acres), along the mainland and around the many small islands, called cayes, according to Global Mangrove Watch. These mangroves protect Belize from tropical storms and erosion; provide vital nursery grounds for fish and other aquatic species; and sequester vast amounts of carbon.

“[Belize doesn’t] have a significant carbon footprint, but we are suffering the brunt of climate change,” says Nadia Bood, senior program officer with WWF Mesoamerica. “We … also want to play a significant role in trying to address the threats and impacts.”

In recognition of the crucial role of mangroves, Belize was one of the first nations to include mangroves in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), its target for reducing emissions under the Paris climate agreement. In 2021, it pledged to protect an additional 12,000 hectares (nearly 30,000 acres) of mangroves, and restore 4,000 hectares (nearly 10,000 acres) by 2030 in its updated NDC.

Achieving the restoration target would capture an additional 1.77million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, and increase lobster catch by a third, according to a 2023 Nature study led by researchers at Stanford University in the U.S.

To further that goal, WWF Mesoamerica is pulling together a national mangrove restoration plan, which it hopes to complete later this year. The plan will prioritize areas where mangroves previously occurred, where restoration will improve connectivity, and where it will bring substantial benefits to communities, Bood says.

To identify those sites, they’re drawing on a slew of field research, climate modeling and community engagement conducted by WWF and partner institutions over the past few years, and the lessons learned from grassroots restoration initiatives, including those at Gales Point and on Placencia Peninsula.

Restoration on Placencia Peninsula, a tourism hotspot

When Marisa Tellez founded the Crocodile Research Coalition (CRC), a Belize-based nonprofit, nearly 10 years ago, she didn’t quite realize what she was getting into.

“I always just thought we were just going to be [working on] crocodiles. But as things evolve, you start realizing … you have to protect habitat,” says Tellez, whose group focuses on the American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) and Morelet’s crocodile (C. moreletii).

Tellez, a U.S. citizen, did part of her doctoral research on parasites and crocodilians on Ambergris Caye, one of Belize’s top tourist destinations, where swaths of mangroves have been cleared for hotel developments.

“I remember telling the forest department, ‘If it does not get slowed down, you’re going to start seeing more attacks [by crocodiles],’” Tellez says. “And that’s exactly what has happened.

Tellez says she doesn’t want to see that pattern repeated on Placencia Peninsula, in southern Belize, where she now lives. Once just a string of sleepy fishing villages, the peninsula is now lined with upscale resorts, holiday homes and newly cleared plots. Mangroves have been cleared, particularly on the leeward side of the peninsula, which borders Placencia Lagoon, a hotspot for wildlife including crocodiles and manatees.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been an influx of North American retirees, and the problem is getting worse, Tellez says. These retirees want ocean views and tend to clear all vegetation from their land, unlike Belizeans who have a strong cultural connection with the mangroves and generally don’t clear-cut, she adds.

Belize does have regulations that protect mangroves. Developers must acquire a permit to cut or modify mangroves, and mangroves can’t be cleared to the waterline. But many people say there needs to be more enforcement.

“As a country, we said that we are setting targets for protection and restoration of mangroves,” Bood says. At the same time, allowing major clearance of mangroves undermines those goals, she adds.

Tellez agrees that halting mangrove loss is obviously the top priority. But she also wants to replace some of the mangroves that have been destroyed, both to restore habitat and change people’s mindsets. She’s starting on Placencia Caye, a small island off the tip of the peninsula, where CRC comanages a 38-hectare (94-acre) reserve.

Carl Wallen, community researcher with CRC and a Placencia native, has been coming out to the caye since he was a youngster, fishing for lobster or just exploring. “A lot of stories here, about manatees and crocs,” Wallen says.

Most of the reserve, which covers a third of the caye, is still a healthy tangle of mangroves. But about two years ago, one of the resorts excavated a new channel, removing mangroves and changing tidal flows. That allowed the high tides to penetrate further into the center of the caye, killing mangroves.

Walking along the boardwalk that cuts through the reserve, Tellez points to brittle gray trunks that stand in the water like ghostly sentinels. “This is all from the dredging,” she says. “These mangroves were not adapted to such high salinity, and so that’s why we have a dead mangrove forest.”

Over the past few months, Tellez and kids from CRC’s youth group, Next Gen Croc, have been replanting mangroves in areas that don’t seem to be recovering on their own. The idea is that these new propagules will be able to tolerate the higher salinity levels. Tellez is happy to see that some are already sprouting new leaves.

“That’s going to be good for wildlife and just the stabilization of the caye,” Tellez says.

But it’s only the first step in CRC’s larger mission.

In Belize, one of the challenges when it comes to mangrove restoration is that most of the coast is privately owned. “A lot of these restoration opportunities are on private lands. So involving the coastal development players, involving private landowners, is really key,” says Dominic Andradi-Brown, lead marine conservation scientist with WWF.

That’s especially true in tourism hotspots like Placencia, where much of the mangrove destruction has taken place on the leeward side of the peninsula, around Placencia Lagoon.

Through some of their outreach work — presentations at local resorts, and participation in community events, for instance — Tellez is trying to change people’s attitudes toward mangroves.

“My whole goal is to get everyone alongside the lagoon, and then even in some areas on the beach, to just plant one propagule,” she says. “Because if everyone did that, it would make a huge difference.”

Galves, of Clearwater Aquarium, says he’s similarly concerned about mangrove loss in Placencia Lagoon, which is also a stronghold for manatees. Mangroves here have been cleared for tourism and shrimp farming. Galves’s long-term monitoring of manatees in the lagoon indicates their health is seriously compromised due to environmental degradation, including dredging. Numerous groups have been advocating for years for the lagoon to be protected.

As part of its work developing a national mangrove restoration plan, WWF Mesoamerica is evaluating Placencia Lagoon as a potential restoration site. It’s already been involved in some pilot restoration projects in the area, and is working with landowners to see about restoring mangroves on abandoned shrimp farms.

In April, both CRC and Galves received awards through WWF’s Mangrove Friendly Development Challenge, in recognition of their mangrove restoration work.

Quantifying ecosystem services from mangroves

Restoration takes money, human resources and time. When it comes to finding those resources, it often comes down to economic value, says Kirah Forman-Castillo, Belize national coordinator with MarAlliance, a marine conservation nonprofit.

The carbon value of mangroves is well documented, but there’s less quantitative data on the other ecosystem services mangroves provide, such as coastal buffers.

“We talk about mangroves as nursery areas [for fish]. Where the limitation is, is that there’s not a lot of research in quantifying those services,” Forman-Castillo says.

MarAlliance recently started a new research project aimed at filling that gap. It’s developing methods to document how fish and other marine species use mangroves. Some methods under trial include using remote underwater video recorders along transects, environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling, and counting fish using shrimp nets.

Right now, it’s working in three areas in Belize where the mangroves are relatively intact. The data will demonstrate the ecological and economic value of intact mangroves, for communities and coastal managers. Eventually, Forman-Castillo says, they hope these methods could be used to see how restored mangroves compare to natural areas in terms of ecological functions.

“Anything that we’re doing to quantify and add numbers is going to be another layer in the knowledge of how mangroves contribute to the ecosystem,” she says.

Banner image: Student from Gales Point primary school planting mangrove seedlings inside bamboo tube. Replanting mangroves along dynamic coastlines is challenging, and the bamboo tubes protect the seedlings from waves and storms. Image by Ruth Kamnitzer for Mongabay.

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Citation:

Arkema, K. K., Delevaux, J. M., Silver, J. M., Winder, S. G., Schile-Beers, L. M., Bood, N., … Young, A. (2023). Evidence-based target setting informs blue carbon strategies for nationally determined contributions. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7(7), 1045-1059. doi:10.1038/s41559-023-02081-1