Global Mangrove Alliance launches the Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool (MRTT)
The Global Mangrove Alliance is very pleased to announce the launch of the Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool (MRTT). The tool invites mangrove practitioners to record and track their restoration projects across its lifetime while ensuring best practice towards sustainable long-living mangrove groves globally.
The second edition of the State of the World’s Mangroves report shows that 8,183km2 of mangroves are considered restorable, globally. Restoring half of these mangroves would build a habitat that generates over 25 billion commercially important fish and shellfish every year and continue to support 4.1 million small-scale fishers and countless communities that rely on mangroves for their livelihoods.
The restoration of losses that have occurred since 1996 could safeguard carbon in soil and aboveground biomass equivalent to 1.27 gigatons of CO2 as well as mitigate damages from storms and reduce flood risk to some 15 million people every year.
The need for urgent and effective mangrove restoration is evident, as is the need to monitor mangrove restoration projects to ensure their success.
Built into Global Mangrove Watch platform – the pre-imminent and most widely-recognised mangrove mapping tool – the one-of-kind MRTT will significantly benefit mangrove restoration results by identifying and tracking success from past, present, and future mangrove restoration activities, and by enabling learning and information exchange between practitioners.
It will underline the success of inclusive and ecological mangrove restoration approaches over mass tree planting, as mangroves restored in this way generally survive and function much better.
Developed by the University of Cambridge, Wetlands International, WWF, and the Global Mangrove Alliance in collaboration with 80 conservation practitioners and scientists from around the world, the MRTT has a flexible structure designed to capture field and desk-based data on mangrove restoration projects in a standardised format.
The MRTT will be suitable for all different restoration approaches, and for projects covering single or multiple outcomes across the full array of ecological and socio-economic benefits mangrove forests provide. There are three critical components to reporting across the lifetime of a project: 1. Pre-restoration site baseline 2. Restoration interventions 3. Post-restoration monitoring. The MRTT accommodates multiple and ongoing entries. Each section consists of several questions with multiple choice responses, with the intention that data providers can rapidly, yet comprehensively, describe their project.
This means that the conservation community will be able to quantify how specific conservation actions lead to outcomes for biodiversity, mangrove resilience, management effectiveness, communities, and governance. In turn, this will help improve mangrove conservation implementation and build a community to support more effective mangrove restoration projects.
Join us in building a shared and effective mangrove conservation and restoration community.
Download the guidelines to use the Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool below.