The memory of the 1999 supercyclone in Odisha is as vivid as a nightmare for Bina Kandi of Biluamundali village in Puri’s Astarang block. She was pregnant and the flooding in her village was catastrophic. “The water rose up to my neck, the walls of my house were damaged and my family had to take shelter in a nearby structure to survive,” says Kandi, 55. The households in Astarang struggled for long after the waters had receded. This was not a stray incident; in the years before and after, the block had been hit by successive cyclones and storms accompanied by strong tidal waves. However, over the last couple of years, they have found a saviour in the tidal mangrove forest, standing strong against the raging winds. Women such as Kandi have worked hard to rejuvenate the mangrove zone and protect the trees from illegal cutting and degradation. “We understand their importance more deeply as they protect us from natural calamities and soil erosion. They also support our livelihoods by sustaining fish, shrimp and wood,” says Kandi.
She became aware of the importance of mangroves after joining the ‘Women for Mangroves’ initiative started in 2022 by climate change activist Soumya Ranjan Biswal, 29, founder of the not-for-profit organisation, Odisha Paryavaran Sanrakshan Abhiyan (OPSA). What started with five women has now grown in scope and scale to include 145 women from five villages leading mangrove conservation efforts at the Devi river mouth in Odisha. The women have established mangrove nurseries and take turns to monitor them. “Nearly 48,000 mangroves have been planted, and around 60,000 saplings are currently being nurtured in community-managed nurseries,” says Biswal, who continues the initiative under very challenging circumstances, mainly through crowdfunding, individual donations, and voluntary community contributions. But the team continues with the ambitious aim to restore and nurture one million mangroves by 2030.
Kandi and other women from the five villages hail from marginalised Dalit communities, and continue to face both social and economic challenges. However, they are clear about one thing: “Mangrove protection is essential for our future generations, irrespective of whatever else we face,” says Kandi.
Coastal communities across the world continue to weather natural disasters at an alarming rate. In such a situation, grassroots conservation efforts such as ‘Women for Mangroves’ become even more significant. A 2020 report, Tangled Roots and Changing Tides, quoted by the Global Mangrove Alliance states that between 1980-2000, 35% of mangroves worldwide disappeared. The causes ranged from cutting down of tidal forests in the name of development or degradation for wood. There is an urgent need to reverse this trend as mangroves play a crucial role in maintaining an equilibrium in the coastal ecosystems and act as “carbon sinks in the battle against climate change, thanks to their location between land and sea and high carbon storage capacity, 3-5 times higher than that of upland tropical forests,” states the report.
Moreover, they play an important role in the local economy, supporting the “livelihoods of over 120 million in coastal communities across the world” through fisheries— mangrove forests act as natural breeding grounds, resulting in higher availability of fish, crabs and oysters. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science have found that India has lost 40% of its mangrove area in the last century, according to a 2018 report in The Hindu. The reasons cited are many, including agriculture, aquaculture, tourism, urban development and overexploitation. There is a pressing need to protect the fragile ecosystems.
GENDER AND CONSERVATION
It becomes important to look at conservation efforts through the lens of gender as well. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, has been exploring gender equity in mangrove restoration through several of its reports and studies. One such survey from 2017 mentions that women and men differ in how they interact with and depend on the mangrove ecosystem. Acknowledging these different roles is essential to any conservation initiative. In many cases, while men migrate to the cities in search of livelihood, it is the women who are left behind to face the natural calamities with their children. It is their labour that goes into managing fisheries and agricultural land. “Integrating a gender-responsive approach into conservation efforts is currently gaining global momentum with significant results toward empowering women and enhancing gender equality,” states the report.
A number of such initiatives are coming up across the globe. There is the Mangroves for the Future Initiative of IUCN and United Nations Development Programme in several Asian countries, which aims to improve women’s social and economic markers. Then there is the team of women caretakers in the Cambodian island of Koh Kapik, who manage a mangrove nursery in the wetlands for restoration and take part in several ecotourism activities. In Papua New Guinea, women not only manage the mangroves but also develop business and conservation ideas while creating local markets for sustainably harvested products like mud crabs and clams. The programme, supported by US’ The Nature Conservancy, is called Mangoro Market Meri.
India, which has a mangrove cover of nearly 4,992 sq. km, is seeing different formats of women-led movements. The most popular is the collaborative model as seen in the initiative launched in 2019 by the Union Government, Green Climate Fund and UNDP to “enhance climate resilience” in coastal communities in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha “by conserving and restoring marine ecosystems, including mangroves and promoting climateresilient livelihoods”. In Odisha too, multiple stateled initiatives like “mangrove and shelterbelt plantations, geo-tube installations, and strengthening of existing embankments have been launched to mitigate these devastating impacts,” states a 2025 report by Behan Box.
Women self-help groups have been at the forefront of the mangrove co-management committees at the village-level, especially in Maharashtra. A 2024 report by the UNDP describes how in Navghar village in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, women came together in 2023 to form two groups, Healthy Harvest and Wild Crab Aqua Farm to sustainably farm mud crabs while conserving the mangroves.
“In mangrove ecosystems, local communities are often the first line of defence—and within those communities, women play an important and often unrecognised role,” says Saurav Malhotra, managing director (South Asia), who leads Mountains to Mangroves, a conservation initiative launched by Conservation International and its partners in 2023 in the Eastern Himalaya. It has been designed to reflect a simple reality that ecosystems don’t function in isolation—what happens upstream in mountain forests directly impacts lowland deltas and mangroves. Hence, its efforts to support livelihoods of local communities, secure water resources and strengthen climate resilience span the Eastern Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal, including Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and north-east India, with the aim to enable the protection and restoration of 1 million hectares of degraded land by 2030.
In the mangrove zones of the Sundarbans, West Bengal, Malhotra has seen a clear division of labour—men fish and women manage the fisheries, collect crabs and shellfish and tend to other coastal resources. “They are working in mangrove forests daily, tracking seasonal changes and noticing shifts in species and water conditions. This place-based knowledge is extremely valuable when designing restoration efforts for the long-term,” he explains.
In Dulki village of the Sundarbans, Madhushree Das is known for her role as the prokriti bondhu (loosely translated as friend of nature). She is called upon by locals whenever a snake has to be rescued, an alarm is to be raised when someone tries to cut down the mangroves, ways to mitigate human-wild conflict are to be devised, or the forest department’s help is needed in wildlife rescue operations. “I am essentially a homemaker. But in 2022, World Wide Fund for Nature-India, as part of its Living Shoreline Project, put out a call for volunteers,” says Das, 35. Men and women from 46 villages in the South 24 Parganas district competed for the positions and 99 were selected. Of these, Das is one of the 45 women prokriti bondhu. “Today, I can identify several species of snakes, and take the right course of action in case any wild animal strays into the village,” she says. The Living Shoreline Project that Das is a part of began after a series of severe cyclones hit the Sundarbans between 2019 and 2021, including Bulbul and Amphan.
The Sundarbans, the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, is home to vulnerable and endangered species such as the Irrawaddy dolphin and the Northern river terrapin. The recurring calamities resulted in shrinking and sinking of land, and loss of habitat for wildlife and humans alike. The embankments, which allow human life to thrive next to the sea, were constantly breached by water, making land uncultivable and forcing people to look at the surrounding forests for resources. According to Anurag Danda, director-Sundarbans programme, WWF-India, a solution was needed to reverse the damage. “What if we could accumulate sediment at a rate that was higher than the sinking of land and rising levels of the sea at the same time?” he says. “Thus the project looked at ways of enhancing longevity of embankments while also restoring mangroves.”
In seven sites, thousands of terracotta silt-traps were installed to hold the sediment. They also allowed mangroves to take root and stabilise the shoreline. The terracotta rings are housed in bamboo frames, which in turn become homes for oysters and crabs. The prokriti bondhu make sure that the sites are not damaged by parking of boats or excavation of soil. “Of all the volunteers, we have observed that it is the women who are setting up the mangrove nurseries, tending to them, warding off goats and wild animals. They have a lot of indigenous knowledge about the soil quality and water inundation. We are learning from them,” says Danda. Plans are afoot to extend this project to parts of Odisha.
Malhotra cites the example of another women-led group in the Sundarbans—the “tiger widows” or women who have lost their husbands to tiger attacks in the mangroves and are now helping restore the forests where the large cats live. “In many communities, these widows face stigma and economic hardship after losing their husbands; they’re often ostracized because of longstanding cultural beliefs,” he says. The women plant mangrove saplings and help strengthen natural protections against cyclones and erosion. “Similarly, on the Bangladesh side of the Sundarbans, our local partner is working with local communities to restore forests across 120 hectares of land,” explains Malhotra. More than 3,000 community members, the majority of whom are women, have been actively participating and diversifying their income by working in the nurseries, transporting and planting saplings or becoming mangrove community caretakers. This ensures the long-term sustainability of the project.
TOURING THE ECOSYSTEM
Women are not just taking care of mangrove nurseries; they are creating new community-led models of ecotourism. One such effort is the Swamini Self Help Group, which was started in the Mandavi creek of Sindhudurg’s Vengurla taluka in Maharashtra in 2017. Shweta Hule and her husband, Satish, had long cherished a desire to take tourists to the mangroves and show them the exquisite birds that would flock to the forests. Hailing from the fishing community, they knew of the oysters and fish that thrived in the waters. However, lack of financial support held them back. They got to know that the Mangrove Cell of Maharashtra forest department, set up in 2012, was working with the UNDP on ecotourism initiatives. Shweta met one of the officers, who asked her to show all of the natural wonders at the creek.
“Until then, we didn’t know there were eight species of mangroves or the role that they played in mitigating global warming or climate change. We knew them as hippali and chipi. My interest increased even more,” says Shweta, 57. While the UNDP was willing to support her idea of a mangrove safari, they preferred if a group of women came together. She reached out to her friends and family, and a collective of nine enterprising women took the form of Swamini. After being trained, the women could relate to the forest even more. “Aur bhi zyada lagaav ho gaya,” says Ayesha Hule, Shweta’s sister-in-law and one of the members. A homemaker, she would earlier spend her day cleaning fish in the morning at the market and in the evening at the port. However, at Swamini, she dons the mantle of an oarswoman and a guide as and when the need arises.
The collective has two boats, which two members row, one looks out for diversions and the other guides a group of 10 tourists. The creek is frequented by many motorboats, but Swamini has steered clear of them as they are bad for the mangrove ecosystem. November and December are the busiest months for them, with tourists coming in from Kolhapur, Pune, Satara and Goa. “In the past one or two years, the area has seen a profusion of water sports. That attracts a lot of tourists. Our clientele is confined to nature lovers, who have read articles about us (on platforms such as Mongabay and Roundglass Sustain),” says Shweta, who also runs a small homestay, where she offers meals and snacks to tourists. The success of their venture has inspired many women groups from across Maharashtra, who often reach out to them for guidance.
Ayesha is witness to the power of mangroves in mitigating the effects of cyclones. In 2021, when Cyclone Tauktae made a landfall in Vengurla, highspeed winds made it impossible for anyone to venture out of home. “However, the damage in our village was considerably lesser than other places. Mangroves ne woh tez hawa rok di (mangroves acted as a barrier),” she says.While people in the district don’t usually cut down mangroves, of late there have been fellings here and there in the name of development. “These mangroves are our heritage, a legacy that has been passed down to us over centuries. We have to protect them for our future generations,” she says.
With these efforts requiring considerable time and energy, the support of family members becomes critical for such conservation initiatives to thrive. As Danda notes, women in rural areas tend to have more responsibilities than men. While shortlisting volunteers for the role of prokriti bondhu, the WWFIndia team reached out to the families of the women to make sure they had a support system in place. “We didn’t want them to suffer in the domestic sphere,” he says. Das, whose family includes her husband and two children, feels it would have been impossible to do the ground work if not for their support. Mamina Kandi, 40, a coastal volunteer with Women for Mangroves from Sana Jhadling village ends up discussing conservation activities with her family after completing household responsibilities. “We want our children to grow up in a safer and more environmentally secure future,” she says.
WHY CITIZEN EFFORTS MATTER
Biswal believes conservation is essentially a people’s movement. Though he was only two-years-old at the time, Biswal grew up listening about the ravages of the 1999 supercyclone. He wondered if there was a way to minimise the impact of natural disasters. In his class X schoolbook, he came across a couple of lines about tidal mangrove forests and the role they play in protecting humans and wildlife from cyclones and tsunamis. He started posting on social media about the need for the state government to devise better policies to conserve these ecosystems. That’s when a teacher from Madhya Pradesh, Abhudaya Rajiv Kelkar, reached out and gave him the example of Jadav Payeng, the forest man of India, who transformed a sandbar in Majuli in Assam into a forest reserve. He asked Biswal to find solutions by harnessing the collective conscience of the people. And that’s how OPSA came into being in 2012 as a community-led conservation movement in coastal Odisha.
“The mangroves on the eastern coast support thousands of flora and fauna species, ranging from dolphins, whales, sea turtles and birds to small mammals, reptiles, amphibians and countless aquatic organisms that depend on these fragile wetland ecosystems for survival,” says Biswal. In the initial years, OPSA managed to generate awareness and yet the mangrove degradation did not stop. The village community was heavily dependent on the forest resources and would cross the river daily to collect wood and oysters. “Women from the Dalit community hailed from extremely vulnerable circumstances, and yet they were highly skilled. They were proficient at catching crabs, collecting wood and climbing up mangroves,” says Biswal. Initially many of them unknowingly damaged the mangroves due to lack of awareness and high economic pressures. “We thought of starting Women for Mangroves to create community leaders and to establish an emotional connection between the communities and the ecosystem. Today, the same women have become frontline conservation leaders,” he says.
For these efforts to be viable and meaningful, conservation and economic growth will have to go hand in hand for the female guardians of the forests.