A booming mangrove restoration sector now creates employment, secures financing, and implements oversight—but a new assessment reveals critical gaps in tracking earnings and ensuring local communities receive their fair portion before outside interests do.
A project spanning 350,000 hectares on Pakistan’s Indus delta is transforming a growing mangrove forest into carbon credits, which companies can purchase. These credits represent a specific amount of carbon, allowing businesses to offset their emissions by investing in carbon storage or reduction projects.
Mangrove restoration generates these credits as the forests absorb and store carbon, contributing to a billion-dollar industry. However, the forests also provide essential benefits to local communities, including storm protection, fish habitats, and resources like wood, honey, and thatch.
Measuring Success Without Transparency
The difference points to a bigger problem: a mangrove has at least two kinds of value – the value that can be packaged and sold to a distant buyer, and the value that is experienced locally but is much harder to monetize. Only the first has a market built around it.
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This gap will be under the spotlight at the upcoming UN climate summit Cop31 in Antalya, Turkey. At last year’s Cop30, governments called for the money provided by wealthy countries to help communities cope with the consequences of climate change to at least triple by 2035.
A decade of climate finance has built pipes that tend to run in one direction, towards whatever can be measured, traded, and exported. Pour adaptation money into that plumbing, and it comes out where the pipes already exist. Restoration has become a new kind of market, creating jobs, contracts, training, and monitoring.
Trade-Offs and Local Communities
However, this market involves numerous intermediaries—verifiers, brokers, aggregators, and certifiers—each taking a share of profits before any benefits reach local villages. The extent of these shares remains unclear, as only a fraction of intermediaries disclose their earnings.
Local communities, often portrayed as part of the problem due to resource extraction, have historically managed their mangrove use sustainably. Their knowledge can significantly contribute to restoration efforts, guiding species selection and planting locations.
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A 2021 global study of 88 mangrove restoration projects revealed that restored forests often lack the full ecological functionality of natural forests. This can impose short-term costs on nearby communities. The Matang mangroves in Malaysia, managed since 1902, demonstrate evolving success criteria over time.
Each time, new priorities emerged, and the definition of a healthy forest rearranged itself to match. Communities often appear in that story when their labor is useful and recede when it is not. Restoration projects can have three broad outcomes, but the second outcome, where the ecosystem recovers but the value drains to intermediaries and distant buyers, is the one worth fixing.
Aarti Krishnan, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and her colleagues, Ahmad Aldrie Amir and Behara Satyanarayana, are exploring how to put the people who live in and around restoration projects at the center of deciding what worked. They are doing this through their Revive project, working across three Malaysian sites to understand what residents themselves count as a good outcome.
The focus should be on aligning project outcomes with local residents’ priorities and understanding the trade-offs within the forest’s value chains. While trade-offs are inevitable, decision-making power can be shifted. Currently, funding sources often dictate decisions, leading to success for some while worsening conditions for those involved in restoration, as seen in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.
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People of all religions invoke Bonbibi, guardian of the forest, who protects those entering out of need and punishes those who come out of greed. Her story is one part of a broader body of local knowledge about how people should use and care for the forest. This knowledge can inform restoration, but it is often sidelined, leading to what researchers have described as a form of exploitation.
A 2026 review of 77 ocean or coastal carbon storage projects found it is rarely possible to tell which outcome you are looking at, because community involvement is so seldom documented. The second outcome is the one worth fixing, as it is the most common and the most deceptive.
For instance, protecting carbon stored in mangrove forests can mean closing a fishing ground, while planting for biodiversity can mean growing species that yield no firewood or fruit. These are choices, not accidents, and the pattern is often familiar: costs are immediate, local, and certain, while benefits are deferred, distant, and uncertain.
Local Involvement in Restoration
The Revive project, led by Aarti Krishnan and her team, aims to understand what residents consider a good outcome for restoration projects. By tracing how these outcomes trade off against the value chains built around the forest, the project seeks to put local communities at the center of decision-making.