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.
Highlights
Coastal flooding impacts are increasing due to coastal development, population growth[1], climate change[2,3], and habitat loss[4,5,6,7]
We provide a global analysis of the social and economic value of mangroves for flood risk reduction
This study provides the first global analysis of the economic value of mangroves for flood protection
Summary
Coastal flooding impacts are increasing due to coastal development, population growth[1], climate change[2,3], and habitat loss[4,5,6,7]. In many tropical and subtropical regions mangroves reduce waves and storm surges, and serve as a first line of defense against flooding and erosion. These benefits are provided through bottom friction, the cross-shore width of forests, tree density and shape. Mangroves have experienced significant losses over the last decades, declining globally from 139,777 km[2] in 2000 to 131,931 km[2] in 201420, with even greater losses before 2000 Most of this loss has happened through the conversion for aquaculture or agriculture and coastal development[21]. This work is based on the approaches developed in previous research papers[29,34,35] and the recommendations of the World Bank[36], i.e.: (i) the use of process-based models; (ii) the application of the expected damage function approach for estimation of damages[37,38]; and (iii) the assessment of benefits by measuring the flood damages that mangroves avert[39,40]
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