Two-Thirds Of Burmese Irrawaddy Mangrove Forests Destroyed Between 1979 and 2011

Mangrove cover in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta declined by nearly two-thirds between 1978 and 2011, leaving coastal areas more vulnerable to disasters like Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000 people in 2008, finds a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

The research, led by a team of scientists from the National University of Singapore and the Mangrove and Environmental Rehabilitation Network in Yangon, is based on remote sensing and field data. It finds that dense mangrove cover in the Ayeyarwady Delta declined from 2,623 square kilometers in 1978 to less than 1,000 sq km in 2011, indicating an annual deforestation rate of three percent over the period. Most of the mangrove loss is attributed to agricultural expansion, primarily for rice production.

The findings, taken in context with the accelerating influx of foreign investment in Myanmar, portend a dire future for the country's mangrove forests unless policies are quickly put into place, warn the authors.

"The centrality of agriculture to the Myanmar economy indicates that emerging policies are likely to tip the scales towards agricultural expansion, agroindustrial investment and potentially greater rates of deforestation due to the introduction of well-funded investors, insufficient land tenure agreements, and low governance effectiveness, the authors write. "The broad national challenge is to initiate environmental governance reforms (including safeguards) in the face of significant pressures for land grabbing and opportunistic resource extraction."

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http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1126-myanmar-mangroves.html