Misalignments between national mangrove monitoring capacities and climate policy ambitions

Jacob J Bukoski, Radhika Bhargava Gajre, Iris Ford, Adriana Gonzalez, K.M. Ashraful Islam, Zhen Zhang, Joanna Acosta-Velazquez, Miguel Cifuentes-Jara, Daniel A. Friess, Sylvia Wilson

Ambitious global targets for mangrove conservation have advanced rapidly in recent years, yet the implementation of these commitments depends largely on national monitoring systems and policy processes. Despite widespread reliance on country-reported data for setting and evaluating targets, little is known about how national mangrove statistics are generated or how they interact with climate policy frameworks. Here, we assess national capacities for monitoring mangroves and evaluate them within the context of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Greenhouse Gas National Inventory Reports (NIRs) submitted under the Paris Agreement. We extracted information on mangrove extent and biomass, as well as their underlying data sources, using country reports within the Global Forest Resources Assessments (FRA) for 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. We then compared these country-reported estimates (from 2005-2020) against independently produced time series of mangrove extent commonly used by the scientific and practitioner communities. We used these data to assess how national mangrove monitoring capacities have improved over the past two decades. We then examined how these capacities relate to inclusion of mangroves in NDCs and NIRs. Our results show highly variable estimates of mangrove extent, yet strong improvements in capacities for monitoring mangroves over the last twenty years. We did not find that countries with greater integration of mangroves into national policy had stronger monitoring capacities; rather we observed that many countries with strong monitoring capacities lack commensurate policy ambition. Our findings show where targeted investment, better data standards, and stronger links between monitoring and policy could help countries meet their mangrove related commitments.