Why the Next Era of Mangrove Restoration Must Be Led Locally
- RARE
- 4 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Rocky Sanchez Tirona, Rare
This month marks a pivotal moment for locally-led coastal protection – Coastal 500, the world’s largest network of local government leaders committed to thriving seas and prosperous coastal communities, has surpassed its 500-member goal, with the addition of 105 local government leaders from Indonesia’s Sangihe Islands in North Sulawesi.
As Coastal 500 reaches this pivotal moment, its significance is not just numerical. It reflects a growing global recognition that the future of coastal resilience will be decided not only in national capitals or at international summits, but in municipalities, districts, and villages where people live closest to the sea. Coastal 500, launched by Rare in 2021, now spans local government leaders across the developing tropics and was created on a simple but powerful premise: local leaders are indispensable to building thriving, prosperous coastal communities. That is especially true for the protection and restoration of mangrove forests, one of the network’s central areas of focus.
Mangroves are often described through the lens of carbon, and rightly so. But for coastal communities, their value is even more immediate. Mangroves buffer shorelines from storm surges, erosion, and flooding. They provide nursery habitat for economically important fish and shellfish. They support biodiversity, improve water quality, and help sustain local food systems and incomes. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization notes that mangrove ecosystems provide a food base for fish, shellfish, and other species that feed millions of people, while the United Nations Environmental Programme highlights their role as both coastal protection and essential habitat for fisheries. In other words, mangrove protection and restoration is not just an environmental agenda. It is a public safety agenda, a food security agenda, and an economic resilience agenda.
That is why local governments matter so much. Mayors, district heads, and village leaders are the institutions closest to the tradeoffs that shape mangrove futures: coastal development, fisheries access, enforcement, budget allocation, disaster planning, and community trust. Coastal 500’s own framing is explicit: even where policies exist, local political leadership and political will are often the decisive factors in implementation. Local leaders can align community priorities with restoration, translate big commitments into practical action, and ensure that conservation is not done to communities but with them.
Indonesia, from which Coastal 500’s most recent and largest delegation of members hail, demonstrates why local government is the link between ambition and action. The country holds the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem, with recent official estimates putting its mangrove area at roughly 3.46 million hectares, or around a fifth to a quarter of the global total. At the same time, Indonesia’s governance reality is deeply local. In 2025, Coastal 500 expanded through a Village Head Partnership in Buton, Southeast Sulawesi, explicitly recognizing village heads as frontline leaders, in addition to the mayors. Our work through Rare shows village governments in Southwest Sulawesi committing public funds to co-led marine surveillance and management. That matters because restoration succeeds when local authorities can do more than endorse it: they must budget for it, organize it, defend it, and connect it to local livelihoods.
This focus on global mangrove restoration reaches far across Coastal 500 geographies. Along the Amazon coast in Brazil, municipalities sit beside the world’s largest continuous mangrove belt. Recent endorsements of the Mangrove Breakthrough by Brazilian states and cities show how multilevel governance can create momentum, but those same announcements emphasize that local leaders drive implementation on the ground. In the state of Pará, where a section of this vast mangrove system stretches across roughly 3,900 square kilometers, municipal leadership is helping align local policy with long-term mangrove protection and coastal resilience. For communities whose economies depend on fishing, shellfish, and other mangrove-linked livelihoods, local stewardship is inseparable from both climate adaptation and community prosperity.
The Philippines offers perhaps the most vivid proof that mangrove restoration pays back communities in moments of crisis. In Del Carmen, which holds the largest continuous stretch of mangrove forests in the Philippines, Mayor Alfredo Coro II has spent more than a decade rehabilitating and preserving the mangroves in his municipality. After Super Typhoon Rai struck in 2021, he argued that those restored ecosystems helped the municipality prepare, reduced losses, and provided a stable food source during recovery. Rare and UNEP reporting on the Philippines echoes this broader point: healthy mangroves and adjacent marine ecosystems can blunt storm impacts while sustaining fisheries that families rely on when formal systems are under stress. This is what resilience looks like in practice. It is not abstract. It is fewer lives lost, less property damaged, and more food on the table after a disaster hits.
In Honduras, the Coastal 500 story shows something else: local leadership is contagious. Former Mayor Juan Ramon Manaiza of Limón describes how lessons from the Philippines helped spark a movement for coastal protection in Honduras. That kind of peer exchange is one of the network’s most important forms of infrastructure. Honduras’s coastal municipalities are now leading collaborative efforts to restore mangrove forests and strengthen fisheries governance in landscapes tied to the Mesoamerican Reef. Rare’s Honduras work is built around partnerships with municipal governments and communities, recognizing that mangroves, reefs, and seagrass are part of one connected food and livelihood system. When local governments help protect these systems, they are not only restoring habitat; they are helping fishers withstand climate shocks and defend their food security.
The lesson across all four countries is the same. Mangrove protection and restoration work best when they are locally owned, politically backed, and woven into the everyday priorities of coastal governance. International initiatives can set ambitious goals, including mobilizing $4 billion to protect and restore 15 million hectares of mangroves by 2030. But those goals will remain aspirational unless financing, authority, and technical support reach the local governments and communities who are best placed to deliver results.
Coastal 500’s 500-member moment should therefore be read as a challenge as much as a celebration. The world does not need more rhetoric about the value of mangroves. It needs more trust in the leaders closest to them. If we want coastlines that can withstand storms, fisheries that can feed families, and climate strategies that hold at the water’s edge, then mangrove restoration must start where accountability is strongest and stakes are highest: in local governments and communities.
About Coastal 500
Coastal 500 is the world’s largest network of local government leaders committed to thriving seas and prosperous coastal communities. With over 500 members across 8 countries, Coastal 500 represents over 2,000 communities that steward almost 100,000 square kilometers of coastline and marine ecosystems on which nearly 4 million people depend for food security, livelihoods, and climate resilience. When local leaders join Coastal 500, they commit to empowering their communities with clear access rights to their fisheries, while promoting sustainable fishing practices, building resilience, advancing transparent, effective and collaborative governance and sharing best practices with peers across the globe.
About Rare
Rare is a global leader in community-led solutions to protect nature, fight climate change, and build resilient communities. Rare serves as the Secretariat for Coastal 500 and is responsible for the day-to-day management of the network. Rare supports members by coordinating network activities and communications, helping deliver programs, tools, and learning opportunities, and supporting engagement with partners and at international fora.
Author Bio
Rocky is the Managing Director of Regional Programs at Rare. In this role, Rocky leads Rare’s work to support community-led conservation of vital natural resources. Based in Manila, Rocky oversees all country teams encompassing Rare’s regenerative agriculture and coastal fisheries work. Previously, Rocky led Rare’s flagship program designed to revitalize coastal fisheries and improve livelihoods in coastal communities, building on the work she led in the Philippines. She has a background in strategic communications and marketing.
