The Global Mangrove Alliance is a Food Planet Prize Finalist

From the Food Planet Prize:
“The Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize is the largest monetary award in the global food arena. It rewards innovative solutions that can help us shift to sustainable food systems within a ten-year timeframe. The Prize  is the Curt Bergfors Foundation’s primary tool to encourage agents of change and promote game-changing initiatives.

In 2020, five change-making initiatives shared four US 1$ million prizes. For 2021 and onwards, the Curt Bergfors Foundation decided to double the award sum and give US $2 million to 2 winners. This means that the world’s biggest environmental award is all about food.”

Mangroves are a critical ecosystem for both marine life and fisheries. The complex three-dimensional habitat they create sustains the production of commercially important fish, crustaceans and mollusks that supports an estimated 4.1 million small scale fishers globally. They provide an important source of protein in many tropical coastal communities, and are the foundation for several high value commercial fisheries. When mapped onto the 2020 Global Mangrove Watch extent, a new fisheries model estimates that the presence of mangroves worldwide supports the production per year of nearly 600 billion young-of-year for the 32 modeled commercial fish and shrimp species alone.

The conversion of mangroves for commodities has been a major cause of loss in the last 20 years. To halt ongoing mangrove loss and ecosystem degradation, we must focus on root causes. To prevent losses to infrastructure development and promote activities such as sustainable aquaculture, our Alliance focuses on carefully managed mangrove ecosystems to compensate and ensure that income and food security for coastal communities benefit from conservation efforts. The Global Mangrove Alliance works with governments and partners to cultivate pro-mangrove funding models, supportive policies, and capacity-building opportunities tailored to the needs of communities in all the regions we work in.

As part of the application process for the Food Planet Prize, a story was produced on the Alliance highlighting mangrove conservation and sustainable livelihood work being done by The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and local partners and community leaders in Marismas Nacionales Biosphere Reserve in Nayarit, Mexico. Stories on the other 9 finalists have also been produced by the Food Planet Prize team and our Alliance looks forward to the announcement of the winners in November.