Preserving Mangroves | Q&A With Dr. Jorge Herrera-Silveira (Español Disponible)
It’s no stretch to say that mangroves are one of the most important ecosystems on the planet for climate action efforts. Mangroves help coastlines weather the effects of climate change-related events, as well as aid in mitigating their causes. They’re incredibly effective as “blue carbon” storage units— in a single square mile, mangroves hold as much carbon as the annual emissions of 90,000 cars, and are able to capture four times more carbon than rainforests.
For the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, mangroves are an integral part of the area’s strategy to alleviate the impacts of increasingly fierce weather episodes, and a source of life for the community and fauna around them. Mexico has the fourth largest amount of mangroves in the world, and the YucatánPeninsula concentrates 60% of the mangroves in all of Mexico.
We chatted with Dr. Jorge Herrera-Silveira, a professor at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the IPN (CINVESTAV-IPN) in Mérida, Mexico, and one of the leading global authorities on mangroves. Dr. Herrera has been working on the ground with RenewWest and local partners in the Yucatán since 2022.
Dr. Herrera has been at the forefront of the conservation efforts in the Peninsula for over 30 years.
As a result of over three decades of dedicated work, Dr. Herrera's team has successfully restored over 2000 hectares of mangroves throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, as well as published several guides and manuals on mangrove conservation.
Renew West (RW): Could you start by sharing a little about your work in the Yucatán area and how you came to work in mangrove conservation?
Dr. Jorge Herrera-Silveira (DJHS): I am going to give my age away a bit — in 1988, Hurricane Gilberto passed through (the Peninsula), which was the second most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic basin. I had arrived in Yucatán a little earlier that year after graduating from university, to begin working in coastal lagoons, the water systems and phytoplankton. While working in the lagoons, I saw that the vegetation that dominates around the area are mangroves. I was completely delighted and fascinated to see these massive trees with their roots and all the fauna that lives inside. When the hurricane hit a few years later, I ventured back to this area and saw the damage to the mangroves, and I started thinking about how to help restore them.
A few years later in the early 90s, a young woman - Claudi Teutli, who continues to work on my team - arrived at the university, looking to study and work with the mangroves. We began our research in this ecosystem, and realized there was very little that had been published in any scientific journals at the time and so we became quite discouraged by many failed experiments. We would monitor reforestation efforts in areas where the mangroves were degraded, and we realized that two or three months would go by and the new plants would fail and die. The following year, more plants were planted in the same area, to no avail. I think this happened for three or four years, and it made us ask ourselves ‘why is this happening, why isn’t the reforestation working?’ That is when we started a new series of studies on mangrove restoration and we began to work on experiments on how to actually get the mangrove back. As a result, we began to understand that reforestation is only one of many actions you can take to restore this ecosystem.
the power of Chelemera women
In the early days of their research
Dr. Herrera’s team needed extra hands to restore the water systems in the mangrove forest — hard work that requires a lot of manpower. At first, they looked to local fishermen for this labor, but found an unexpected group of workers became a fundamental part of their conservation efforts.
RW: How is the work you do in the mangroves connected to the community living in this area?
DJHS: In the early days of our research, my team and I turned to the local fishermen community to search for extra hands to help carry out the experiments in restoration. We would introduce ourselves to the municipal president or the Commissioner of the fishing communities to tell them that we had a project and that we needed a large number of people to work with us. However, when the fishermen realized we were saying that they would need to work in the mangroves, they were very hesitant to join since the conditions in the mangroves are quite adverse to work in. The area is very humid, there is mud, there are many mosquitoes, there are animals, some quite dangerous. In addition, the pay we were able to offer the fishermen was not enough for them to join; but it just so happened that some of their wives were present at the meetings. They came up to ask if there was any reason they weren’t able to do this type of work, to which I replied that there was actually no obstacle for them to participate.
These first groups of women that raised their hands to join the conservation efforts turned into a fundamental pillar in Dr. Herrera’s work. The “Chelemera women” (so named due to their hometown of Chelem in Yucatán) have now been working in the mangroves for over 10 years, and gained international recognition for their work in conservation. The Chelemera women have contributed to the reforestation of approximately 50 hectares of mangroves, which represents 50% of the swamp of Progreso’s forest cover.
DJHS: Now they are very successful. They even have their own Facebook page! They have been interviewed by international media, they have won awards and we continue to support them still.
Economic and Environmental Benefits
Restoring and protecting the mangrove ecosystem has vital economic and environmental benefits for the area of Yucatán.
Dr. Herrera expresses that the communities are the first to notice how much less negatively affected they are by weather conditions with a healthy mangrove ecosystem thriving on the coastline.
RW: Can you please share more about the specific resilience benefits to coastal communities and their livelihoods?
DJHS: Yes, of course. The Yucatán Peninsula sees many hurricanes, storms, floods per year, and the communities are able to recognize that they have been less impacted when they are close to a swamp, because then the mangrove is performing that protective function, either in absorbing water or reducing wind speed. The mangroves are also a popular area now for guided ecotourism trips offered by the very same communities that made the channels in the first place. Groups of tourists are taken on trips through the water channels, to see the multitude of birds, crocodiles and fish that live in the mangroves,a and so the communities are now being directly benefited by this restoration effort in an economic way as well, it is a very successful endeavor.
Another benefit to the communities comes from the fauna that is now thriving in the restored mangroves area. In the north of the Yucatán peninsula, when you go to a restaurant, you are served a small snack before your main dish arrives. In Spain they call it a “tapa”, in Mexico we call it a “botana”, it’s a simple appetizer - and the area is famous for serving a type of snail called “chivita” as a snack. The women of Chelem find and gather these snails that live in the mangroves and sell them to the restaurants, providing them with another source of income that’s directly related to the restored mangroves.
COMMUNITY AND SCIENCE
Dr. Herrera’s team now uses an approach of hydrological and topographical recovery of the mangrove ecosystem, and this line of research is what has led to Dr. Herrera’s team writing several guides and manuals on mangrove restoration over the last 20 years.
RW: What would you say are the highlights of these past 30 years of work in mangrove conservation?
DJHS: We have been on the entire journey over the years: from basic research, to implementing projects, to working with the communities, training them, and ultimately generating guidebooks. We have published not only published scientific articles on mangrove restoration, but also brochures and booklets for the communities in more colloquial language.
I would say that one of our greatest accomplishments is having developed a restoration process that both involves and benefits the community in the mangrove ecosystem. We are not just in the lab or in the office, we are in the field, we are with the communities - and they are in fact the ones that restore the mangroves. And for us, this is our greatest source of satisfaction, the fact that what we do has a real impact on the ground, and it’s not just laid away in our scientific journals.
And our system is highly effective. We have projects all over the Yucatán peninsula, and we do not have any projects in which we have not recovered mangroves.
The road ahead in mangrove conservation
In over 30 years of dedicated work
Dr. Herrera’s team has successfully restored over 2000 hectares of mangroves in the Yucatán area. He emphasizes, however, that there is still a long way to go.
RW: What would you say are the upcoming challenges in your work?
DJHS: Mexico has around 30 to 40 thousand hectares of degraded mangroves, due mostly to variations that occur in the mangroves’ hydrology stemming from human activities, such as poorly constructed roads, newly-opened connections to the sea to favor sheltered ports, commercial fishing, and others. There is still massive potential for continuing and potentiating these efforts and we know what can be done (in conservation) because we’ve been doing it for years. Want to see how? Come to Yucatán and take a tour with me.
