// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Turning the tide: restoring Mozambican mangroves — in photos
Words by Melissa Hobson and visuals by Diego Menjíbar Reynés
The mangrove forest area near the Costa do Sol wetlands.
The mangrove forest area near the Costa do Sol wetlands.
As urban expansion in Maputo threatens to destroy mangrove forests, marine biologist Célia Macamo is studying how to save them.
The peat that oozes out of the sampling device is dark and sticky. Collecting soil from the mangrove forest near Maputo is a grubby job, but ecological assessments like this one help Célia Macamo — a marine biologist at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo — to estimate how much carbon is stored in the soil.
The clues she finds in the soil help to produce carbon credits — certificates generated by projects that calculate how much carbon these ecosystems store. One carbon credit is usually equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Companies buy carbon credits to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions and landowners are financially rewarded for protecting their local area. This creates a way to protect habitats and to prevent the land from being cleared for development or aquaculture.
In Maputo, urban expansion is encroaching on the mangroves. For example, wealthy people are flocking to build houses in the neighbourhood of Chiango, which borders the Costa do Sol wetlands, because of its central location and proximity to key infrastructure.
Macamo looks at a map of Maputo’s mangrove dynamics between 2000 and 2023. The red patches show mangrove loss, the blue patches show mangrove expansion and the green patches show areas that are stable.
Macamo looks at a map of Maputo’s mangrove dynamics between 2000 and 2023. The red patches show mangrove loss, the blue patches show mangrove expansion and the green patches show areas that are stable.
Fierce competition for these new homes causes house prices to soar, and their maintenance costs are “horrible”, Macamo says. Wooden structures rot easily, are corroded or weakened by the salty air and the waterlogged ground can lead to shifting or sinking foundations. “People are there, fighting nature, which is a lost battle,” she says.