In a small fishing community in Sierra Leone, Ibrahim Mansary and Saidu Kamara had a mission to complete. The Chairman (Ibrahim) and Secretary (Saidu) of the Mosam community’s Mangrove Restoration Committee were keen to re-stimulate a neglected effort to establish a mangrove nursery, an idea introduced by the West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC) Program. After experiencing frustrating and fruitless attempts to motivate other committee members in the past, these two community icons joined forces and emerged as leaders of the mangrove restoration process.
“Most of our membership want immediate benefits, and maintaining a mangrove nursery for three to six months appears too long a time to sustain interest,” said Chairman Ibrahim. “So, I decided to closely work with the Secretary of the committee and a few other members, putting into practice the trainings and capacity building programs we received.”
Mangrove restoration has community-wide benefits including reduced erosion and increased biodiversity. These issues are particularly prevalent in Sierra Leone’s coastal landscape, a biodiversity hotspot, where communities face tremendous challenges from both climate change and human activities like mining and deforestation. Sierra Leone is the third most vulnerable country in the world to the effects of climate change (GlobalSecurity.org, 2017), and the impacts have adverse environmental, social, and economic implications for human communities and for biodiversity. The destruction of mangrove forests alone is already leading to the loss of plants and animals, the exacerbation of flooding, and the erosion of the coastlines and riverbanks. More severe flooding and erosion are causing the destruction of property and putting lives at risk.
To increase coastal resilience to the impacts of climate change, WA BiCC is working with coastal communities like Mosam to create mangrove restoration committees. Mosam, a small fishing community, has become severely prone to flooding, storm surges, and salt water intrusion due to the massive degradation of mangroves for fuelwood and construction.
Citizens from Mosam had initially and enthusiastically worked with Saidu and Ibrahim to establish mangrove nurseries. However, over time, the majority of the committee members wanted to abandon work on the nurseries because of the amount of time needed for maintenance. Managing the nursery, they felt, was eating into time allocated for fishing. While the committee members’ interest waned, the two leaders received information from WA BiCC about the cost of leaving these mangrove forests degraded as well as the benefits of mangroves to their lives and livelihoods. They learned about the mangroves’ role in protecting coastal communities from storm surges and in providing a habitat for varieties of fish. With this information, Saidu and Ibrahim were able to advocate for the restoration of the mangrove forest.
Following their efforts, other community members started to appreciate the need to maintain the mangrove forest and agreed to help transplant the seedlings and maintain the site. A once-faltering project is now on its way to success due, in large part, to local leadership that acknowledged and addressed the tension between time spent restoring mangrove forests and the longer-term benefits of restoration. Saidu and Ibrahim’s passion and advocacy about the community-wide benefits of restoration convinced community members that maintaining the mangrove nursery is worth their time and effort. Mangrove forests, once depleted, are now re-growing along Mosam’s coast and will protect the community for years to come.