The world’s mangrove forests are finally growing back after decades of loss

On abandoned rice fields near the village of Kyauktaung, in Myanmar’s Myeik District, young mangroves are filling in where farmers once worked. Satellite pictures of the district show the same patch of coast in 2010 and in 2026, and the later frame is greener. The local story repeats at world scale in NASA’s Landsat record: mangroves lost nearly 3,000 square kilometers (1,200 square miles) between 1984 and 2010, then gained back nearly 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) after 2010.

Read next on Morning Overview: Melting permafrost is setting off a newly identified kind of catastrophic landslide, scientists say

Researchers called the later increase unexpected, and Asia, Australia and South America led it.

Forty years of Landsat canopy maps

The figures come from a study by Zhen Zhang of Tulane University and colleagues, published in Science in June 2026, and summarized for a wider audience in a NASA Earth Observatory feature by Adam Voiland on Nov. 13. The team analyzed Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2023 to track the extent and density of mangrove canopy. Zhang called the product the first global mangrove maps covering such a long period. According to Mongabay, the dataset has a 30-meter resolution and was built annually, a step beyond earlier work that leaned on radar, which has trouble telling mangroves from other ecosystems.

The rebound has limits. Net global change since the 1980s is still about a 1 percent decline, so the forests are growing back without having fully recovered. Mongabay’s figures from the paper put the net loss from the 1980s to 2010 at about the size of Rhode Island, and Down To Earth’s summary of the extent data has global area at about 154,810 square kilometers in the 1980s, 151,928 in 2010 and 153,961 in 2023. Closed-canopy stands, the dense kind, rose from about half of the world total in the 1980s to about 58 percent by 2023.

Mudflats, abandoned ponds and warmer coasts

Zhang told Mongabay that the field had systematically underestimated the ability of mangroves to expand by themselves. He also said about two-thirds of the expansion came from mangroves colonizing new areas, with the remaining third from restoration and regrowth in degraded forest. Near the mouth of the Amazon and in northern Australia, steady growth since the 1990s tracks sediment that built new mudflats for seedlings to settle on. In Myanmar, which NASA calls Burma, the country lost about 28.6 percent of its mangrove area between the 1980s and 2010, then regained about 10 percent. NASA pairs a Landsat 5 image of the district from Feb. 14, 2010 with a Landsat 9 image from Feb. 2, 2026, and conservation and tree planting are under way on nearby Pyin Bukyi Island. The authors credit greater awareness and restoration after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, stronger legal protection of forests and heavy sedimentation.

Live Science’s coverage adds that the study’s other recovery routes include recolonized aquaculture ponds, and that warming has pushed mangroves poleward along the U.S. Gulf Coast, where fewer hard freezes let them survive in places that were once too cold.

Losses that continue in the Niger Delta and storm zones

Not every coast is in rebound, and the trees themselves are modest: they average about 13 meters (43 feet) tall. NASA reports large losses in the Niger Delta that pulled down total mangrove area across West and Central Africa after 2010, and Eco-Business ties that hotspot to crude oil production, with losses in Nigeria rising since 2002. North America and southern Africa have seen widespread degradation after tropical cyclones, and the 2021 Texas freeze and Hurricane Ian in 2022 caused dieback and damage. A summary in Down To Earth counts the Rufiji delta in Tanzania, where rice farming is converting mangroves despite protected status, among the continuing losses.

Southeast Asia’s loss peaked between 1990 and 2005, driven largely by clearing in Myanmar and Indonesia, and it has since slowed considerably; Zhang cautioned that the paper does not mean mangroves are totally healthy worldwide. The authors suggest prioritizing an end to deforestation and support for natural regeneration over intensive replanting, and the 2024 Red List of Ecosystems from the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that about half of the world’s mangroves are vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. The stakes are carbon and coastlines. NASA notes that mangrove ecosystems can store up to four times as much carbon as taller inland tropical forests, and that their roots shelter fish, shrimp and crabs while softening storm surge for coastal communities.

Daniel Friess, a Tulane professor who directs its Mangrove Lab and co-authored the paper, warned that the gains may not hold under climate change and that conservation and restoration are needed now. Zhang’s own caution, quoted by NASA, is that the successes of the past decade should not be seen as grounds for complacency. Whether the post-2010 gains survive the next round of storms and freezes is the figure the next set of Landsat maps will answer.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.