Event

OECC will co-host the side event below and our staff will be speaking as an expert at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD-COP16) in Cali, Colombia, 21 October – 1 November 2024.

Side Event
Title: Mangrove conservation and restoration maximizing synergies with climate change control, disaster risk and poverty reduction for coastal communities

A healthy mangrove ecosystem contributes to address multiple social challenges simultaneously, such as climate change, coastal disaster risk and communities’ livelihood enhancement. However, global extent of mangrove forests has drastically declined over the last decades, which caused the reduction of such ecosystem functions/services. Many mangrove range states are currently accelerating to restore degraded mangrove forests. Private companies also recently have a great interest in conservation and restoration of mangrove ecosystems which store much higher carbon, expecting to purchase carbon credits and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

However, mangrove plantation without considering other ecosystem services would result in antagonistic trade-off among the services.

In order to restore mangrove ecosystems ensuring synergies with its multiple services, we should apply an integrated ecosystem-based management, of which key elements are stakeholder participation and adaptive management based on scientific monitoring. Mangrove conservation and restoration implemented by such an integrated approach can maximize synergies with climate change mitigation and adaptation, disaster risk and poverty reduction for coastal communities. The scale-up of the approach can contribute to achieve the multiple targets of KM-GBF, especially restoration of at least 30% of degraded coastal ecosystem (Target 2), minimizing climate change impacts on biodiversity (Target 8) and enhancement of nature’s contribution to people (Target 11), and also achieve the national commitments on biodiversity (NBSAP) and climate change mitigation and adaptation (NDC) in mangrove inhabiting countries. Aiming at the contribution to such global and national commitments, this side event is to:

1. Share mangrove ecosystem conservation and restoration activities by partner country, organizations, private sector and JICA,
2. Identify good practices and challenges for ensuring synergies with the multiple ecosystem services, and
3. Discuss what and how we have to implement in mangrove conservation and restoration in order to maximize multiple benefits/services of mangrove ecosystems.

For more information, please see here.

Programme