Southeast Asia spent fifty years destroying its most useful coastline. It’s finally growing back, and Vietnam has the receipts.
Nobody puts a mangrove forest on a postcard. Ask someone to picture Southeast Asia and you get white sand, a longtail boat, maybe a temple roof catching the light. Nobody pictures a tangle of grey roots sitting in brown tidal mud, which is a shame, because that unglamorous tangle has spent the last fifty years doing more genuine work for this region than almost anything else along this coastline, and for most of that time we were tearing it out as fast as we could build shrimp ponds and beach resorts on top of it. New research reported by Mongabay this month says something that conservation stories almost never get to say without a caveat attached: Southeast Asia’s mangrove cover has stopped shrinking and started growing again, and has been doing so since 2010. Indonesia and Myanmar are doing most of the heavy lifting. Nobody threw a parade about it, because mangroves don’t photograph well and good news travels slower than bad, but it happened anyway.
I’ll admit I used to think of mangroves the way most travellers do, as the unglamorous bit you fly over on the way to somewhere nicer. That’s a mistake, and not just a sentimental one.
Why This Actually Matters
A mangrove root system does the coastal engineering job that seawalls and breakwaters try and mostly fail to do, at a fraction of the cost and without the concrete. It breaks a storm surge before it reaches anything with a roof on it. It traps the sediment that would otherwise choke a reef or a seagrass meadow to death a few hundred metres offshore. It’s a nursery for more fish than you’ll ever eat, which coastal communities up and down this region depend on in a way that’s a lot more direct than “biodiversity” makes it sound. And the carbon numbers, once you actually look at them, are startling: a hectare of mangrove can hold somewhere between 1,000 and 2,700 metric tons of carbon, several times what an equivalent patch of tropical rainforest manages, and it holds onto it in waterlogged soil for centuries rather than releasing it back out the way a burned or logged forest does within a decade.
Indonesia is the country that makes the scale of this clearest, because Indonesia is also the country that shows how badly it went wrong first. It holds around a quarter of the world’s mangroves, roughly 3.5 million hectares historically, and lost more than 1.5 million of those hectares to exactly the thing you’d expect: shrimp ponds, cleared by smallholders trying to make a living the fastest way available to them. That’s not a villain story. It’s what happens when there’s no other economic reason to leave a mangrove standing. The restoration effort that’s followed, targeting hundreds of thousands of hectares under programmes run with international partners, is essentially an attempt to build that missing economic reason back in, and the same pattern shows up in Myanmar, where replanting projects across the Ayeyarwady delta are turning a couple of thousand hectares at a time back from bare mudflat into forest. None of this is controversial among the people who study it. It’s just invisible to everyone else, because it isn’t pretty, and we’ve built an entire tourism industry around what’s pretty.
Indonesia holds around a quarter of the world’s mangroves, and is leading the region’s replanting effort.
Vietnam’s Comeback Forest
Vietnam’s Can Gio Mangrove Biosphere Reserve, an hour and a half or so out of Ho Chi Minh City by road and ferry, is the clearest argument I know for why that needs to change. This was not, forty-odd years ago, a nature reserve. It was defoliated, stripped and left for dead in the years after the Vietnam War, the kind of place you’d have written off as unrecoverable if you’d stood in it in 1978. Replanting started that same year anyway, tree by tree, on land that had every reason to stay barren, and today it’s a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of more than 75,000 hectares, older by decades than the newer designations Asia Unmasked has covered elsewhere in this region, and about as complete a rebuttal as exists to the idea that ecological damage is simply permanent. It isn’t. It just takes longer than a news cycle, which is exactly why nobody wrote about it until the trend line had already turned.
None of which means Can Gio asks you to sit through a lecture to enjoy it. Boardwalks thread through the densest stands of forest close enough that you can see exactly how those roots are built to survive being drowned twice a day. Kayak channels run narrower and quieter for anyone who’d rather not share the water with a tour boat, and several hundred long-tailed macaques treat the main walking routes as their own, which they largely are. Most Ho Chi Minh City operators run it as a straightforward half-day out, Monkey Island included, and it asks very little of you beyond showing up with decent shoes and a willingness to look closely at something that isn’t trying to impress you at first glance. That’s rarer than it should be in this part of the world, where most attractions are built to be photographed from a specific angle. Can Gio isn’t. You have to actually pay attention, and I’d argue that’s the whole point.
Why This Should Change How You Travel
What I keep coming back to is that mangrove tourism might be one of the only genuinely low-conflict forms of ecotourism left in this region. Walking a boardwalk or paddling a channel does almost nothing to the habitat itself, unlike, say, wildlife tourism that quietly stresses the animals it claims to celebrate, or beach tourism that erodes the coastline it’s selling. The money visitors bring to a reserve like Can Gio gives the people managing it a direct financial reason to keep protecting it rather than lease it out to the next shrimp farm, which is precisely the incentive structure that got mangroves destroyed in the first place, just run in reverse.
It isn’t only reserve managers doing this work, either, and this is the part I find genuinely hard to shake off. In Tanakeke, a small archipelago off South Sulawesi in Indonesia, a group of women called Womangrove have spent the past decade replanting mangroves in exactly the kind of abandoned shrimp ponds that caused the damage in the first place. A woman named Hayati, one of the group’s founders, has been returning to survey the same plots since 2015, and by all accounts they’re thriving, dense enough now that it’s hard to picture the bare tambak ponds they used to be. It’s a small operation against a very large problem, and it’s also precisely the kind of story that never makes it past a specialist environmental outlet, because there’s no single dramatic before-and-after photo, just a decade of unglamorous, patient replanting by people whose coastline was worth more to them intact than converted. Multiply that story across the fishing communities and restoration collectives working the same problem from Sulawesi to the Ayeyarwady, and the regional numbers stop being an abstraction. They’re a decade of exactly this, repeated.
Matang, on Malaysia’s west coast, is one of the region’s oldest managed mangrove forests.
If you’re travelling anywhere along Vietnam’s, Indonesia’s or Myanmar’s coastlines this year, you have more of these places open to you than existed a decade ago. Asia Unmasked’s earlier piece on Cambodia’s own mangrove forests covers a different stretch of the same story, and it’s a similar argument in a different country: the coastline you were told to fly over might be the one worth actually landing at. Fifty years ago this particular stretch of Vietnam was bare mud and dead trees. It’s now one of the more convincing arguments I’ve come across that damage done to a coastline isn’t necessarily the end of the story, given time, the right people, and a willingness to replant something that doesn’t photograph well. Southeast Asia spent decades getting the mangrove story wrong. It’s worth a detour to see what it looks like when a region finally gets it right.
