TDA-IME Project Final Report June, 2013 The importance of the Indochina mangroves is obvious from their plant diversity (two-thirds of all true mangrove species occur in the Southeast Asian region) and the fact that five Asian countries alone: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Philippines share more than onethird (34.5%) of the global total area according to Giri et al. (2010). The same authors also mention that only 6.9% of the world’s mangrove forests come within formally protected areas. Root Cause Analysis of Key Issues Mangrove Conversion The six countries participating in the TDA-IME Project contributed information on the proximate causes of mangrove conversion that are summarized in the Causal Chain Analysis (see Section 5). Except for Singapore, which specified land use changes along riverbanks for reservoir construction caused by the demand for freshwater, the other countries all listed urban and/or industrial development and aquaculture as the leading causes of mangrove conversion; while a further cause of mangrove loss has been conversion for agricultural use (mainly oil palm) in Malaysia and Thailand. The intermediate causes of mangrove conversion are shared broadly by most of the countries; namely: 1. Coastal land use changes by governments that give priority to investments in 58 urban/industrial developments and their associated infrastructure. 2. Commercial investments on coastal land based on short-term financial considerations without regard for the economic benefits of mangroves as a common access resource. 3. Failure of governments to regulate expansion and intensification of shrimp farming. 4. Inadequate EIA procedures to ensure sound alternative land use decisions. 5. Inadequate availability or consideration of mangrove economic data, including the diversity and full value of all mangrove services. 6. Lack of community participation in land use planning and approval processes. 7. Inadequate legal instruments, or their lack of enforcement, to prevent mangrove encroachment and eventual conversion (by stealth). The fundamental, or root causes of mangrove conversion in Indochina have been population growth and demand for natural resources; profit-driven development priorities; and in the case of Singapore alone, an inadequate supply of freshwater. An additional future underlying cause of mangrove loss is climate change (mainly from sea level rise and climate-related hazards), which is aggravating the already high anthropogenic impacts on mangrove ecosystems Mangrove Degradation A similar matrix identifying the immediate and root causes of mangrove degradation was prepared from information contributed by the TDA-IME Project countries, but because the causes of mangrove degradation were similar country to country, the Causal Chain Analysis is shown as a region level one (see Section 5). A number of the common causes of mangrove degradation overlap with the causes of mangrove conversion. This is not surprising, because degradation and conversion are often merely different stages in the process leading to complete mangrove loss. Ong (1993), for example, suggested that “burgeoning populations are possibly the biggest cause of mangrove destruction and degradation”.
Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis of Indochina Mangrove Ecosystems
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