Climate change is a fairly new topic amongst the people of India and had remained

relatively obscure until recent before the massive press coverage of the
Copenhagen Summit. General discussions of how human activity is adversely
contributing to climate change are now beginning to emerge in school and colleges
but terms like mitigation and adaptation come nowhere even close to realisation
let alone implementation. Indias current climate policies can be best termed as
reactive adaptations in its most literal sense. This essay will cover one these
adaptations in the city of Mumbai, India.
Mangrove forests are home to several species of plants, animals and marine life.
They act as a natural barrier against floods, protect the shoreline from soil erosion,
and absorb almost eight times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than any
other ecosystem. But they have been constantly under threat and being destroyed
to make way for roads and buildings, for commercial aquaculture, and by marine
pollution.
Mumbai which is situated on the west coast of India has between 35 and 45 square
kilometers of mangrove forest. This is all that remains after almost 70% was
destroyed in land reclamation projects, according to Debi Goenka, a Mumbai-based
environmentalist.

Garbage is dumped into these intertidal areas which upsets the salinity of the
seawater and chokes off mangrove tree roots. The dumping is a technique to
illegally reclaim the land, and subsequently build on it once the trees have been

destroyed and as a result, people tend to associate mangroves with filth and smell.
Mr. Goenka, who has been working to protect Mumbais mangroves since the
1980s said Historically, mangroves have been treated as unimportant because
nobody knew anything about them and when we spoke about mangroves, the
response we would get was mangoes?
Better late than never, knowledge about the benefits of mangroves has been
increasing in India after the tsunami of 2004. For example, the villages of
Pichavaram and Muthupet in the southern state of Tamil Nadu were protected by
mangroves and suffered less damage than villages without this natural barrier. Also
in 2005 monsoon floods in Maharashtra killed nearly 1,000 people in Mumbai
alone..
In 2005, the Bombay High Court ruled to prevent any further destruction of the citys
mangroves. It cited Indias Forest Conservation Act of 1980 as well as the Coastal
Regulation Zone Notification of 1991. Under the FCA, the use of forest land for nonforest purposes is prohibited without the approval of the central government. With
this Notification, mangroves are protected because they only grow along the coast
and are ecologically sensitive.
The crunch for space has exacerbated the conflict between the environment and
urban development. The latter has usually won with disastrous costs, but we are
now seeing a slight shift in the paradigm. A proposed international airport in New
Mumbai, the second in the city, has been delayed because it hasnt received
environmental clearance from the government. More than 400 acres of mangroves
and 1,000 acres of mudflats would have to be destroyed to build the airport, says
Mr. Goenka.
Mr. Vasudevan, chief conservator of forests in Maharashtra heads Maharashtras
mangrove cell, which the state government formed in 2012 to conserve and protect
mangrove forests. This committee has established a mangrove nursery in north
Mumbai and planted 250,000 mangrove saplings in five locations in the city. The
cell is working with the local Municipal Corporation to make the citys mangroves
accessible to people for recreational purposes, with proposals to promenades and
boardwalks around the edges of mangrove areas. It is impossible to deploy people
to police all of the areas with mangroves, he says. This is the best way to protect
them, he said.
In a city like Mumbai which is starved of open spaces, Mangrove forests are one of
the few ways to give people space to breathe. They should be safeguarded instead
of being destroyed under the guise of development.