forests were cleared for decades to make room for shrimp and housing.
The economic case at the time was straightforward and counted only what could be sold.
What the forest provided for nothing did not appear in any column.
A belt of mangrove reduces wave energy, holds and shelters the young fish that the fishery depends on.
Rebuilding a concrete sea wall costs several times what maintaining the forest would have cost.
Provinces that replanted have measured the difference during storms rather than in a model.
Replanting, however, fails more often than official reports suggest.
planted in the wrong zone, at the wrong or without protection from waves die within a year.
Survival rates in some programmes have been below a fifth, and the area is still recorded as .
The projects that worked shared one feature that has nothing to do with biology.
Local households held a documented right to harvest crabs and honey from the area.
A forest that belongs to somebody specific is guarded; a forest that belongs to a programme is not.
Carbon finance has begun to fund such work, which introduces a familiar difficulty.
Payments require measurement, and measuring stored carbon in a forest is expensive and contested.
A simpler payment for area protected, verified by satellite, delivers less precision and far more forest.