Roots of Resilience: The Women Preserving Asia’s Ancient Mangrove Forest

Local collectives in the Sundarbans are leading the charge to restore a vital marine ecosystem.

December 15, 2025 6 min read

Economy

Credit: Studio Vertex/Shutterstock.

Straddling the border between India and Bangladesh, where the rivers Ganges, Meghna and Brahmaputra converge and flow into the Bay of Bengal, an ancient forest of mangroves stretches over 3,860 square miles. This labyrinth of misty saltwater channels, mudflats and marshy land known as the Sundarbans is the world’s largest mangrove forest, and home to millions whose lives are tied to the tides.

But over the years, those living here — all mostly dependent on farming and fishing — have watched these tides turn hostile, with rising sea levels, increased salinity in the soil, and cyclones like Aila (2009), Amphan (2020) and Remal (2024) battering both the Sundarbans ecosystem and the communities that depend on it.

“With every high tide and storm surge, more salt is deposited in our fields, making them infertile,” Poornima Bhunia says. Her son is among tens of thousands of Sundarbans locals who have left their villages to diversify household incomes in the face of vulnerability to extreme weather and environmental degradation.

Traditionally after a natural disaster, NGOs come in for a period of time, bringing relief that focuses on urgent needs, such as repairing homes, distributing food and restoring water.

Members of AgniKanya display seed pods from the various types of mangrove that they plant, each of which is suited to different soil and water conditions. Credit: SEEDS.

But after Cyclone Amphan wreaked havoc in the region in 2020, the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), an NGO that works to develop resilience to climate change impacts across India, realized recovery couldn’t just be about rebuilding what was lost. As they worked with people who were bearing the brunt of increasingly more intense climate events year on year, it became apparent that they needed to help prepare the land, as well as the people, for the next storm.

In the Sundarbans, the solution was all around them: Mangroves, often referred to as one of the “big three” marine ecosystems, together with salt marshes and seagrass beds. Between them, they account for over 50 percent of carbon storage in oceans, and mangroves are surprisingly effective in reducing the speed and intensity of tsunamis and tidal surges. “We decided to plant mangrove saplings along degraded coastlines so that they’d provide a natural green buffer against the waves,” says Yezdani Rahman, chief of programs at SEEDS.

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The key, says Rahman, was integrating the initiative into the local community. Many living in the villages dotting the Sundarbans landscape had been battered, not just by the frequent cyclones and tidal surges but also by a crippling lack of jobs and opportunities. “We realized that the only way to ensure the long term sustainability of our mangrove restoration project was to link local livelihoods directly to it,” Rahman says.

With local field partners, mangrove restoration experts and villagers — those who have “folk wisdom that has evolved through generations of living with mangroves in the Sundarbans,” says Rahman — SEEDS enlisted women’s self-help groups (SHGs) in Sundarbans villages, including the one Bhunia belongs to, to plant mangroves along embankments near the water. These small voluntary collectives in Indian villages usually engage in collective action, and sometimes also support members with microloans from the corpus created through monthly contributions. SEEDS turned them into mangrove protectors.

Thakur Dashi Shee. Credit: SEEDS.

“We learnt to identify new sites for plantation, how to intercrop different mangrove species with native grasses, and how to maintain existing mangroves in low tide areas,” Bhunia says. “One day this will become a green wall that will protect us from storms and high tides. The Sundarbans are my motherland, but she no longer nurtures us like she used to.”

Other women’s groups like AgniKanya (“fiery girls” in Bengali) in Uttar Baikunthpur, which is close to the tiger reserve in the Sunderbans delta, started small mangrove nurseries.

Every other day, 52-year-old Thakur Dashi Shee, a senior member of *AgniKanya *who lives in a temporary house on the water’s edge, wades into the water looking for mangrove fruit before breaking them open and carefully extracting the seeds. She says that last year AgniKanya planted 20,000 saplings — “this year we hope to double that number” — and made a profit of about Rs 60,000 (about $660). The group found buyers in the forest department, NGOs and private parties from across the country, and hopes that the demand (and their income) will increase in the coming years.

By building the capacities of dozens of such women’s groups, SEEDS has developed what they call an “ecology as economy” model in which protecting mangroves and improving the ecology of the Sundarbans directly contributes to the local economy.

And it seems to be working. Dashi Shee says that since AgniKanya fortified their embankments two years ago, they have observed that they have escaped relatively unscathed from natural disasters compared to embankments with no plantation on them. After Cyclone Remal in 2024 caused minimal damage in their mangrove plantation areas, she says that even the village leaders have become interested in joining the SHG’s efforts.

The ecosystem benefits of mangroves have been extensively researched. There is evidence that forested wetlands such as mangroves can sufficiently reduce record-high waves during storms, functioning as a form of nature-based coastal protection. And when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit coasts of Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, areas located behind mangrove forests suffered less damage compared to exposed areas, especially those in southeastern India. This was probably because mangrove forests that are at least 1,600 feet wide are able to absorb over 75 percent of the incoming wave energy.

The Sundarbans, a UNESCO world heritage site, was declared endangered in 2020 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Much of its deterioration is manmade — a result of a perception that mangroves are “wastelands” of no value, economic or environmental.

“Unrestrained coastal development, fishing, deforestation and other human activity has resulted in tremendous degradation of the mangrove systems in the Sundarbans,” says Dr Krishna Ray, associate professor of botany at West Bengal State University and an expert in restoring mangrove habitats.

In 2014, Ray began restoring a severely degraded area at a confluence of three rivers in the Sundarbans that was deeply vulnerable to flooding. Using multiple mangrove species and native grasses to reduce erosion, improve the plantation’s carbon sequestration potential and stay true to the original Sundarbans habitat, she observed that it took about five years of stewardship before the saplings could survive on their own.

Ray’s project, which ran for 10 years in total, has now become “dense and impenetrable,” she says — the ideal outcome. Moreover, the trees in the area have now begun multiplying without human intervention. “70 percent of the new growth has come up on its own, we planted only 30 percent,” she says.

In 2020, when Cyclone Amphan made landfall close to Ray’s plantation site, she predicted “utter devastation,” she recalls. “I thought my first site was totally lost.” But it was actually intact, thanks to the multiple mangrove species that supported each other, and native grasses that protected the embankment.

Members of the Pallishree SHG plant mangrove saplings in the Sundarbans. Credit: SEEDS.

Positives aside, Ray worries about the future of the mangroves she so painstakingly restored, now that the project has ended and there are no funds to continue to pay local community members to protect it.

Perhaps this is what makes SEEDS’ “ecology as economy” model replicable and sustainable. Women’s SHGs have found multiple sources of income from mangrove nurseries, embankment protection and selling associated crafts. Moreover, through training and seeing how mangrove plantations act as effective barriers against the tide, many have developed a sense of ownership and pride towards them.

And the numbers are encouraging. SEEDS has scaled its plantation from 5,500 saplings in 2020 to over 415,000 saplings planted across more than 42 hectares in 2025. 17 women’s groups manage mangrove nurseries in the Sundarbans and, based on the work they’ve been doing there, the NGO is developing similar nature-based solutions for other flood-prone regions in India.

But restoring mangroves in the Sundarbans is not without challenges. Researchers estimate that rising sea levels and salinity could cause the Indian Sundarbans mangroves to lose between 42 to 80 percent of their current area by the end of this century. Rising tides have intensified the salinity of the soil, and this has promoted the proliferation of salt-tolerant but less carbon-rich mangrove varieties, while populations of the Sundari (Heritiera fomes), the species after which the Sundarbans was named, have fallen. Mangrove restoration projects are also hampered by fragmented governance, short-lived planting programs lacking long-term scientific backing, and weak enforcement — all contributing to patchwork outcomes rather than extensive living landscapes.

Moreover, ecologists working on the bio-restoration of mangroves in the Sundarbans are deeply critical of the use of vetiver grass to stabilize embankments, as it is not native to the area. Ray is one of them. “Vetiver is not at all salt-tolerant,” she says, adding that plantation areas are inundated with saltwater every six hours because of the Sundarbans’ unique tidal cycle. “In the intertidal zone, which is the actual abode of mangroves, this vetiver will never, ever grow.”

Back in her home on the water’s edge, Bhunia waits for her migrant son to return home and worries about the next big cyclone. But every time they sell a mangrove sapling, she feels happy as she is earning with dignity — all without leaving her village.

She and others in her SHG plan to reinvest some of their income in mangrove restoration, save some for emergencies and put the rest into nest eggs to fund future small businesses. While building living mangrove walls could take years to show tangible, large-scale impact in the Sundarbans, their work goes to show that linking the local economy to restoring local ecology is a smart defense against the impacts of climate change.