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. 2020 Mar 10;10(1):4404.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-61136-6.

The Global Flood Protection Benefits of Mangroves

Pelayo Menéndez  1   2 , Iñigo J Losada  3 , Saul Torres-Ortega  3 , Siddharth Narayan  4   5 , Michael W Beck  4   6
Affiliations

The Global Flood Protection Benefits of Mangroves

Pelayo Menéndez et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Coastal flood risks are rising rapidly. We provide high resolution estimates of the economic value of mangroves forests for flood risk reduction every 20 km worldwide. We develop a probabilistic, process-based valuation of the effects of mangroves on averting damages to people and property. We couple spatially-explicit 2-D hydrodynamic analyses with economic models, and find that mangroves provide flood protection benefits exceeding $US 65 billion per year. If mangroves were lost, 15 million more people would be flooded annually across the world. Some of the nations that receive the greatest economic benefits include the USA, China, India and Mexico. Vietnam, India and Bangladesh receive the greatest benefits in terms of people protected. Many (>45) 20-km coastal stretches particularly those near cities receive more than $US 250 million annually in flood protection benefits from mangroves. These results demonstrate the value of mangroves as natural coastal defenses at global, national and local scales, which can inform incentives for mangrove conservation and restoration in development, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and insurance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Annual expected benefits from mangroves for flood protection. Estimates of the effects of mangroves on avoided flooding to land (a), people (b) and property (c). The differences between scenarios with and without mangroves are the present flood protection benefits of the habitat.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Annual expected benefits provided by mangroves to (a) people and (b) property per 20-km coastal unit. Base maps reprinted from ArcGIS Online maps under a CC BY license, with permission from Esri, original Copyright © 2018 Esri (Basemaps supported by Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus Ds, USDA, AEX, Getmapping, Aerogrid, IGN, IGP, swisstopo, and the GIS User Community).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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