The FFEM Mangroves Initiative: Building our resilience on nature

Benin
West Africa
AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS
Climate change

Mangroves play a major role in mitigating and regulating the impacts of climate change: they act as a bulwark against violent storms and contribute to carbon sequestration and storage. It is also essential for maintaining local populations in the vicinity, notably as a habitat and nursery for species exploited for local economic development.

The Mangroves Initiative

The French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM) has been supporting coastal resilience and climate change adaptation projects for several years.

The Mangroves Initiative considers the role of mangroves as a nature-based solution: through the restoration of mangrove ecological functions, the restoration of environmental conditions and uses favourable to their natural regeneration, ecological engineering, as well as “grey and green” solutions that combine infrastructure with softer approaches.

Through the Mangroves Initiative, the FFEM aims to foster the exchange of experiences between mangrove coastal protection and regeneration projects, enhance scientific and technological knowledge, and build on and promote their achievements.

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The objectives

The challenge of this initiative is to collectively build, based on proven experiences, a solid case for the importance and methods of restoring mangroves. This initiative is part of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030).

Foster the exchange of experiences by networking projects; assess the different technologies implemented, their effectiveness, advantages and disadvantages, and their cost; evaluate their adoption by local communities and the benefits provided.

Enhance scientific and technological knowledge, through scientific monitoring in the field of mangrove and green belt restoration, focusing on maintaining their functions, their capacity to mitigate the impacts of climate change, and their role in carbon sequestration and storage. Provide information on initiatives other than those of the FFEM in this field.

Build on and share the achievements and best practices of projects, through the production of capitalization documents and dissemination tools.

Projects of the Mangroves Initiative

The Mangroves Initiative focuses on 4 projects deployed across all regions of the world (Asia, Africa, and Central America). These projects share converging objectives and many common features: restoration, monitoring, education, development of economic activities related to mangrove enhancement, and support for public policies.

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Our partners

The initiative relies on local specialists involved in the projects, as well as national and international mangrove experts.

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Activities of the Mangroves Initiative

This monitoring involves tracking the many mangrove restoration projects worldwide, practical guides, and newly developed technologies. This information will be provided by experts and their networks, as well as through monitoring efforts. It will be made available to everyone online on the initiative’s website.

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Seminars are organized each year at a different site. Their objectives, for the project being visited, are to discuss experiences, methods, and results, but also to analyse the successes or failures encountered by the projects, with a view to cross-capitalization. A final feedback seminar is organized in France with all stakeholders working on these issues.

Experiences are regularly documented during seminars and field visits in order to feed capitalization and communication tools. A final capitalization document is produced in the form of a methodological guide. The promotion of the initiative is carried out through:
• the FFEM website: www.ffem.fr
• practical sheets on the tools and methods developed,
• the methodological capitalization guide,
• a general public illustrated book on the role of mangroves and project experiences,
• the production and dissemination of films and photos of the projects,
• the publication of the proceedings of the final seminar,
• exhibitions.

A photojournalist also contributes to promoting the project’s achievements by capturing images of the projects (films, photos) and developing an image bank to support communication tools.

The initiative is based on research carried out as part of a PhD, jointly led by the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier and the consulting firm CREOCEAN.