Environmental Impacts Of Mangrove Forests

Mangrove forests are a type of wooded coastal wetland found along the shores of the tropics all over the globe. They are at the interface between marine and terrestrial world providing large benefits to both location (Hayes-Conroy, 2002) and a source of wonder and visual beauty.

The mangrove forests have been considered as waste land, unproductive regions along coastal areas in the past on the contrary, humans now see mangrove ecosystems as an obstruction to their economic practices. Mangroves globally have been disappeared with alarming speed; at least thirty-five percent of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed in just in the last decade (The Ocean Portal Team, 2015) and still counting. Ironically, during this same period people have begun to realize their importance as a key to a healthy coastal ecosystem but proper management, regulations and control are still in the process of building up. As a result, mangrove forests are now among the one of the most threatened major tropical environments in the world. According to Hayes-Conroy (2002) human activities threaten to destroy this unique ecosystem that in turn, this destruction would also be extremely harmful for all of the natural and human systems that are dependent on them.

Mangrove forests are only one link in a chain of ecosystems and one ecosystem cannot exist without the other (Klugel, Feller, Heyman, 2003) so thorough destruction might result in future suffering. Thousands of species at all levels of marine