Mangrove Initiative

The Knowledge for Development Foundation is undertaking support for Mangroves for Coastal Resilience Initiative which seeks to support coastal communities in:

  1. Mapping activities to track mangrove areas, tenure rights, forest, climate, and livelihood issues;
  2. Stakeholder engagement and capacity building exchanges; and
  3. Implement evidence-based policy advocacy to target regulation reforms in Thailand.

Mangroves are critical ecosystems.

Healthy mangrove ecosystems are globally known as a biodiverse ecosystem that has large potential to capture carbon comparative to other ecosystem types. They are our natural barriers along coastlines, protecting and reducing the impacts of cyclones and tropical storms from ongoing erosion. Ecosystem services from mangroves are effective in controlling floods, recycling nutrients, filtering pollutants and assimilating heavy metals.

Mangroves are also critical components of the coral reef ecosystem providing complex habitat structure for numerous juvenile fish species. In Thailand, more than 75% of commercially caught fish use mangroves at some point in their life cycle. Mangrove forests are governed as public lands by the national government. However, empirical evidence has shown that community participation in mangrove forest management has more sustainable results than having the government manage it alone.

In 2015 the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR) officially recognized the value of local mangrove stewardship, and in 2022 a legal framework for community forest management was created. The DMCR agency established formal protocols allowing villagers to create Community Forests, providing them with ten-year management authority.

Community Forestry is a participatory forest management model in which the community is the main decision maker. The goal is to preserve the forest in its entirety, along with meeting the livelihood needs of local people. There are many different components to the Community Forest Management Plan, including conservation, restoration, education, and utilization at household-level.

Mangroves in Thailand are thus important not only biodiverse zones of significant importance to coastal protection but for livelihoods. Many households depend directly on mangrove forests for fishery products, medicines, and forest products such as firewood, charcoal and building materials. The loss of mangroves significantly impacts local communities and directly translates to losses in fish catch and food insecurity along with the ecosystem services that they provide.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which devastated much of southern Thailand was a call to action!  The tsunami not only took many lives but wrecked havoc on the livelihoods of mangrove communities. The entire ecosystem was altered to the extent that species of aquatic life and their habitats were changed permanently. Those who faced the greatest losses started to raise awareness in the communities about the important ecosystem services that mangrove forests provide. Protection of the existing mangrove forests, restoration of degraded mangrove and abandoned aquaculture ponds began in earnest to rejuvenate mangrove forest promoting a healthy ecosystem for the long-term social-economical benefits.

Yet mangroves across the coast of Thailand are under threat. Commercial charcoal exploitation has destroyed significant mangrove habitat nationally. Mangrove forests have been razed to create short-term shrimp farms, leaving badly-damaged soil and disruptive infrastructure behind. New construction of tourist facilities, deep-sea port infrastructure, marinas, power plants, and residential construction have all reduced mangrove habitat in recent years.

Many recent efforts to restore mangrove have been unsuccessful, citing the restoration in unproductive locations such as mudflats, ignoring the need for species diversity, soil profiling, and hydrological support necessary to sustain the forest. Where successful initiatives have been prevalent, communities have always been at the forefront of leading conservation efforts. Demonstrating that community engagement in protecting mangrove forests and restoration efforts are critical to decision making and natural resource management solutions.

Our Mangroves programming

01. Community Organising for Coastal Protection

K4D is working in selected coastal villages in Southern Thailand to assist in accessing community forest rights. This involves supporting villagers to organise their communities to submit an application for mangroves protections under the CF mechanism. K4D is facilitating the coordination of an active and participatory Community Forest Management Plan, that complies with government protocols to protect the mangrove forests which the villagers rely on. We are supporting mapping efforts to demarcate their mangrove boundaries and track natural resources, through data sovereign approaches. 

02. Women’s Leadership

Women are often left out of conversations and subsequently decision making, around the natural resources they rely upon to support their livelihoods. As the primary family care takers and stewards of mangroves their knowledge is often discounted and traditionally ignored, yet they will be the most vulnerable to climate change and impacts upon mangrove, especially fisheries, could lead to food insecurities and loss of traditional medicine. K4D is supporting the upskilling of women to engage in local enterprise initiatives such as tie dying and beekeeping, to ensure alternative livelihoods whilst protecting their mangroves. 

Empowering women to become leaders in the community and articulating their stories on how they can take on key positions within governance structures to contribute towards greater environmental  protection. Read more about these amazing women here.

03. Digital Literacy and Data Sovereignty

Data and the digitization of our environmental is becoming increasingly an important tool in conservation efforts. In order to ensure that communities are able to be included in these systems and processes our initiative provides digital literacy skills and ensure data sovereignty in order to protect digital rights. This support offers training support to collect, analyze and distribute data and information in ways that respect community rights as well as ensure effective decision making with their needs and interests. Respect and acknowledgement of the Asian Indigenous Knowledge and Data Sovereignty framework are critical to upholding fair and equitable principles of data governance as well as respect for Indigenous data rights.

04. Carbon Financing Research

The climate crisis has sparked great discussions globally. Thailand intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from the projected business-as-usual (BAU) level by 2030 with it’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions (2022) policy. The ambitious proposal also seeks to meet net-zero emissions targets by 2065. Various other policy regulations in place have also sparked the design and implementation of carbon financing initiatives in mangrove areas under the Thailand Voluntary Emission Reduction Program (T-VER) scheme. Carbon financing schemes are off-set initiatives founded on the basis that polluters of our environments can counter their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of carbon credits. K4D undertook research in targeted mangrove areas to explore how these initiatives are perceived and currently implemented. These research reports are available here and here.

Mangrove communities who are already signatory to MOU agreements have expressed concerns in the equitable implementation of the schemes. Up to 99 communities have signed agreements covering an area of 162,590 Rai (26,014 ha), yet most communities we have engaged with do not understand the terms within the agreement. It is unclear if communities had any negotiation power to influence the terms of the MOU as much of the rights and benefits seem to be solely weighted towards the company’s benefit. Clauses within the MOU include:

  • That all intellectual property derived through the “mangrove planting for the community’s carbon credit sharing” be the sole intellectual property rights of the company. 
  • Community land, resource and tenure rights are not mentioned in the MOU, yet the company has a lease over the initiative for 30 years. 
  • The company will provide financial support for program implementation at THB 450 per Rai in the first year and THB 200 per Rai on an annual basis from the second year to the 30th year of implementation.
  • At the same time a community with a fund of THB 200,000 is provided for promotion of the initiative, joining learning or other activities and investments that promote the initiative. 
  • The benefit sharing scheme between the company, communities and government are specified at 70 %, 20% and 10% respectively. 

There are many questions which have been raised by communities and local stakeholders regarding the equitability of the initiative and amongst these concerns include:

  • Are the rates the company has agreed to pay set at fixed rates or will it fluctuate with market value and the voluntary carbon markets? 
  • How do they assess carbon standing stocks and their value? 
  • Although the MOU isn’t a legally binding agreement there is no provision for examining risks and impact upon community livelihoods, which is reflected in the absence of language around mitigation strategies and restitution avenues for failure to comply with the agreements from both parties. 
  • Communities have traditionally been the guardians of mangroves, how is this past and future effort being protected? What are community rights to traditionally managed mangroves within these carbon schemes? 

Our continued programming hopes to work with communities who are currently engaged in these initiatives to raise awareness of the schemes, provide training on their rights in the context of the agreements and existing legislation and fundamentally examine the implications of the programs, both positive and negative impacts upon their livelihoods. Although the implications of the carbon financing initiatives may take several years to be realized, documenting the initial phases of the initiative will allow us to understand the existing social-economic circumstances of engagement versus the eventual outcomes over time.