TDA-IME Project Final Report June, 2013 coastal resources. Malaysia and Thailand are middle income countries, while Singapore’s per capita GDP is three times that of Malaysia and five times that of Thailand. All six countries have extensive coastlines compared to their land area, especially Philippines. Cambodia’s coastline is the shortest relative to the land area, but is very important to the country economically and as part of the transboundary coastline shared with Thailand and Viet Nam. Singapore actually has a very long coastline relative to its size, but stands out as being different to the other countries, having little policy interest in mangroves, although the two most significant mangroves areas still remaining in Singapore are well protected. As a result of the 2004 tsunami and concerns about climate change, mangroves are becoming more appreciated in the other countries for shore and storm protection, especially in the Philippines and Viet Nam; and to provide coastal communities with their basic livelihood and food security needs. The historical and present uses of mangrove forests are summarized for each country in Table 10, based on information provided in the TDA-IME Project country reports. Mangroves in Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam were exploited heavily for charcoal, a practice that, fortunately, has now almost ceased in the region. There is a ban on all mangrove tree-cutting in the Philippines, for example, and charcoal production in Thailand is now confined to small privately-owned forest areas. However, illegal tree-cutting continues in most countries due to inadequate enforcement of the regulations protecting mangroves. The policy shift away from timber exploitation to utilizing mangroves only for non-timber forest products (NTFPs) means that as mangroves are rehabilitated and the resource increases, then the value of the mangroves’ provisioning and supporting services to the fisheries and aquaculture sectors should also rise. The importance of coastal fisheries and aquaculture in the economy of the region is very high, at more than 10 million tonnes per annum for capture fisheries, and about 7.65 million tonnes from marine and brackishwater aquaculture (Tables 11 and 12). As discussed in Section 2, it is almost impossible to relate the presence of mangroves to fishery yields on any scientifically-founded basis, but it is notable that the capture fisheries data include a number of mangrove-associated fish and shellfish species (e.g. milkfish, cockles). These and other mangrove-associates, like penaeid shrimp and oysters (Crassostrea spp.), are also strongly represented in the aquaculture data, at least for some countries. Thus, justification for conserving the remaining mangrove forests, and rehabilitating degraded areas back to an ecologically healthy state, is probably best made by researching the linkages between mangroves and fisheries/aquaculture on a transboundary scale, and where possible quantifying the relationships in economic terms. For the foreseeable future, the coastal zones bordering the Indochina region will come under ever increasing pressure to both absorb more people as the human population grows, and to support the expansion and diversification of national economies. It is a paradox that higher fisheries production is required to help feed the rising population in coastal cities and towns, yet these urban settlements are themselves a major cause of mangrove loss and degradation, a trend which is actually reducing aquatic productivity and therefore the mangroves’ food provisioning capacity. Given the accepted failure of government-only mangrove management, Cambodia, Philippines Thailand and Viet Nam have introduced more progressive and socially acceptable conservation policies for mangrove forests, involving community participation in mangrove management. Variously known as community-based management, comanagement, or stewardship, these alternative management systems involve the principle of shifting governance responsibilities from government exclusively, to a shared governance (co-management) or local governance basis. 45
Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis of Indochina Mangrove Ecosystems
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