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The Philippines, with the fifth longest coastline in the world, holds at least 50% of known mangrove species and is considered one of the top 15 most mangrove-rich countries. Philippine mangrove forests cover an estimated 2,473.62 km 2 (955.07 sq mi) of coastline as of 2003, which comprise 3% of the total forest cover remaining in the country.
During the 1970s, mangroves occupied as much as 200,000 km 2, encompassing approximately 75% of the world's coastlines. [24] Now, global mangrove area has experienced significant decline where at least 35% has been lost. Mangroves are continuing to diminish at a rate of 1-2% per year. [24]
Their loss would be ‘disastrous’, conservationists warned as a global assessment on how mangroves are faring was published. Half the world’s mangroves ‘at risk of collapse’ as climate ...
Why mangroves can be good: They could help protect against sea level rise because their stick-like roots help build up the soil height and their falling leaves decompose into soil.
Mangrove environments in the Eastern Hemisphere harbor six times as many species of trees and shrubs as do mangroves in the New World. Genetic divergence of mangrove lineages from terrestrial relatives, in combination with fossil evidence, suggests mangrove diversity is limited by evolutionary transition into the stressful marine environment ...
This decline has led to a negative chain of effects in other ecosystems that are dependent on mangrove forest for survival. [15] In just the last decade, at least 35 percent of the world's mangroves have been destroyed, exceeding the rate of the disappearance of tropical rainforests. [ 16 ]
[106] [107] Likewise, the 2010 update of the World Mangrove Atlas indicated that approximately one fifth of the world's mangrove ecosystems have been lost since 1980, [108] although this rapid loss rate appears to have decreased since 2000 with global losses estimated at between 0.16% and 0.39% annually between 2000 and 2012. [109]
The figure at the right shows projections of mangrove distributions under low (15 cm), moderate (45 cm), and severe (95 cm) sea rise scenarios by the year 2100. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report which was finalized in 2014 is now predicting 52–98 cm sea level rise by 2100.