Jacarta - Millions of hectares of mangrove forests in Indonesia are being lost to agriculture, oil palm plantations and even fish farms, making coastal communities more vulnerable to the force of tropical storms and the loss of livelihoods and products.
“There’s quite a lot of evidence that mangroves reduce wave and wind energy in relation to storms, and also reduce the impacts of coastal erosion,” said Ben Brown, the Indonesia representative of the Mangrove Action Project (MAP), an international NGO that works to conserve and restore mangrove areas worldwide.
“Where mangroves go missing, villages and shorelines are heavily impacted in relation to storms. Some are inundated with tidal waters, whereas years ago, when mangroves were intact, these villages didn’t suffer from these effects,” he told IRIN.
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In the 1980s there were 4.2 million hectares of mangroves in Indonesia, but by the end of the 1990s more than half of that coverage had been lost due to agricultural expansion, and the current level is unclear.” He said the Indonesian government’s Fisheries and Maritime Affairs department has budgeted for the conversion of a further 675,000 hectares of mangrove into land for agriculture to meet short-term economic goals, which would remove a third of the remaining mangroves.
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