Quantifying the presence and potential of national legal frameworks for global mangrove protection

Abstract

Legal protection of mangrove ecosystems supports biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation and adaptation, but evaluating the global extent and level of protection provided by national mangrove laws is challenging. We assess national laws and policies in the 116 countries that contain all the world's mangroves and use Bayesian multivariate regression to model the probability of the adoption of mangrove laws based on geopolitical and ecological factors. We find that 82.2% of the world's mangroves are in jurisdictions with explicit national legal protection. Jurisdictions with a high extent of mangroves that provide significant ecosystem service values are more likely to have mangrove laws; jurisdictions with lower GDP are more likely to employ provisions for community management, environmental impact assessment, and cross-sectoral coordination; those with higher GDP were more likely to include mangroves in coastal planning laws. Our analysis can inform efforts to implement existing laws and target legal reform.