The Gulf of Thailand teems with seafood again: mackerel, sardines, bream, squid, tiny pink shrimp, snails, anchovies and glossy green crabs. In Koh Kresna, a coastal village in Cambodia, fishermen haul their catches each morning and take them straight to market.
“Every day, we are out catching fish and selling them,” says Khiev Sat, the village leader and the head of a family with generations of fishers. His sister rides by on a bicycle stacked with the morning’s haul. After decades of scarcity, Khiev says, the community fishery is strong.
That abundance was not always the village’s story. When Khiev was young, local waters were mostly empty. Like many coastal communities worldwide, Koh Kresna suffered from overfishing, environmental damage and the wider effects of climate change. The turnaround, however, had less to do with new fishing methods than with one group of plants: mangroves.
Mangrove forests grow where few other trees can — in salty, waterlogged soils along tidal shorelines — and their complex root systems create sheltered, nutrient-rich habitats that are ideal nurseries for juvenile fish and crustaceans. Radhika Bhargava Gajre, a coastal geographer at the National University of Singapore, notes that a large share of the fish people eat depends on these sheltered mangrove habitats.
A 2024 analysis by a coalition of governments and international biodiversity groups estimates that mangrove roots support roughly 800 billion young fish, prawns and other crustaceans each year. Those roots also trap sediment, stabilize shorelines and slow waves, making mangroves valuable for both food security and coastal protection.
But mangroves are under intense pressure. The United Nations warns that about half of the world’s mangrove areas could be at risk of collapse by 2050. Many forests were cleared for shrimp farms, cut for charcoal, or removed for coastal development; pollution and rising seas add to the stress. If forests are weakened or fragmented, they become much more vulnerable to storms and other shocks.
Cambodia felt these losses acutely. The Khmer Rouge years and the economic collapse that followed left many people with few options: mangroves were cut for charcoal and fuel, and the loss of those forests meant fewer sheltered nurseries for young fish. Local fisheries dwindled, and villages shrank as some residents left for other work or emigrated.
Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating over the next decades, researchers, NGOs and local leaders began spreading the message that protecting and restoring mangroves could revive fisheries and protect communities. In 2003, Koh Kresna and the neighboring village of Lok formed a community fishery organization to manage shallow coastal waters and control harvests. Today the fishery safeguards more than 145 acres of mangrove forest along its shoreline.
The community also replanted mangroves. In the past two years, fishery members and villagers planted more than 2,000 saplings with assistance from international groups including the Red Cross and Landesa, a U.S.-based land rights organization. “It is a lot of work. It takes a lot of cooperation between the fishery members, the government and nongovernmental organizations,” says Rusrann Loeng, who leads coastal projects for Landesa in Cambodia.
Cambodia’s local efforts mirror a broader global shift. After decades of rapid loss, the net loss of mangroves slowed: a 2023 U.N. analysis found that net mangrove loss decreased by 44% between 2010 and 2020 compared with the previous decade. Conservationists credit community stewardship and targeted restoration for much of that improvement.
The benefits of mangroves go beyond more fish. Their roots hold soil and dissipate wave energy, reducing erosion and the force of storm surge — protections that become more important as storms grow stronger with climate change. Research looking at a major 1999 cyclone in India found that villages with more nearby mangroves experienced far fewer deaths, illustrating how these forests can save lives.
Mangroves are also carbon-rich. Leaf litter and woody material become buried in muddy soils, where decomposition is slow, enabling mangroves to store carbon at high rates. One study found mangroves can hold up to four times as much carbon as many other forest types. Although mangroves cover only about 0.2% of the world’s forest area, a World Resources Institute analysis reports they contribute roughly 2% of global forest carbon removal.
Young community members in Koh Kresna understand those wider benefits. “We know this helps with climate change,” says 21-year-old Khiev Chien, a member of the fishery and the son of the village leader. “We are helping the whole world.”
For Koh Kresna, restoring and protecting mangroves has translated directly into more fish in the water, steadier incomes on shore and a stronger, more resilient village. Their coordinated protection, replanting and local management show how community action can rebuild ecosystems and deliver benefits that expand beyond a single coastline.