After Decades of Loss, Southeast Asia's Mangroves Are Growing Back

For a generation, Southeast Asia was shorthand for mangrove destruction. Between the 1980s and 2010 the region accounted for nearly 60 percent of the world's mangrove losses, as shrimp ponds and farmland replaced the tangled coastal forests fastest between 1990 and 2005. A new analysis finds that the story has quietly turned around.

Drawing on 40 years of satellite imagery, researchers tracked mangrove cover worldwide from 1984 to 2023 and documented a striking reversal. Around 2010, expansion and regrowth began to offset the losses. Since then, Southeast Asia has flipped from the leading source of destruction to one of the largest contributors to recovery, responsible for roughly 43 percent of the mangroves the world regained between 2010 and 2023.

Two countries drove much of the turnaround: Indonesia and Myanmar, where the aquaculture and farming that once cleared the forests slowed markedly. The researchers credit a mix of deliberate restoration, stronger legal protections and natural regrowth, with much of the gain coming from mangroves spreading into new ground rather than old forests healing.

Denser, healthier forests

The recovery is not only about area. The study, led by scientists at Tulane University and built from a high-resolution Landsat dataset, found that surviving mangroves are also becoming less degraded. Closed-canopy forest – the dense stands that store the most carbon and best shield coastlines – rose from about half of all mangroves in the 1980s to roughly 58 percent by 2023.

That matters far beyond the tideline. Mangroves buffer coasts against storms and erosion, shelter fisheries that feed millions, and lock away outsized amounts of carbon. Across the full four decades the world still shows a small net decline of around one percent, and the gains remain uneven – parts of West and Central Africa are still losing ground. But the overall trajectory has bent toward recovery.

"After 2010, we see some very hopeful signals," study co-author Zhen Zhang told Mongabay. "It's a good story." For an ecosystem long written off as heading toward collapse, that is a rare and welcome verdict.