Tran Thi Phuong Tien remembers when the floods came. Sitting at her cafe in Hue city, where she roasts her own coffee beans and serves sizzling beef that draws customers from the other side of the Perfume River, she recalls how Tropical Storm Eve hit the coast in October of 1999, pounding the region with more than its monthly average of rain in just a few days. The massive rainfall, which landed mostly upstream, conspired with the tide to cause the largest natural disaster for the area in the 20th century. The sea spilled aggressively through the narrow, unprepared streets of the communes and the single-storey homes of Hue. The unfeeling water rose shockingly fast.
An estimated 600 people died in those few days, and the damage amounted to about $300 million. It left the province of Thua Thien Hue, and others in that region of north-central Vietnam, fearful of the next time the sea would come to claim the land as its own.
The 1999 disaster is what people in Thua Thien Hue talk about when you ask them about climate change, as reflexively as a hiccup, as if it were a textbook example. The connection isn’t accurate, explains Pham Thi Dieu My, director of the Center for Social Research and Development, a Hue-based nonprofit. The cyclical, if severe, storm had the fiendish luck of bringing together heavy rains, high tide, and a lack of preparation. But for Pham, who has been educating the community about climate change, the memory has been crucial for waking up residentswomen in particularto the realities of their future.
So when Pham approached the local branches of the Vietnam Women’s Union, with a simple idea to help the land and sea withstand the coming danger, she found willing volunteers. They didn’t need marches or commitments from world superpowers to catalyse them into action. The women of Thua Thien Hue were ready to rescue themselves. And in doing so, they joined a global movement to preserve and restore one of the most crucial and widespreadyet neglectedtools for thwarting climate-driven destruction: mangrove trees.
Mangroves are often referred to as the nurseries of the seaclusters of them make breeding grounds for fish and crustaceans. Although exact estimates are hard to come by, it’s likely that hundreds to thousands of fish species spend their lifecycle around mangroves. Researchers estimate that 80% of the global fish population is dependent on healthy mangrove ecosystems, and in turn 120 million people worldwide depend on them for income. Migratory birds also make seasonal homes in mangroves.
All of this makes planting these trees an ideal project for a type of climate change preparation known as ecosystem-based adaptationthe harnessing of natural resources to build resilience to climate change. It may be best understood by what it isn’t: grey. Sea walls, reservoirs, and dykes built of hard materials are the opposite of ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA). Such structures are typically the result of top-down decisions and funding. EbA, by contrast, is bottom-up and focused on the connection between people and their environment. It is most effective, says Philip Bubeck, who researches climate change adaptation at the University of Potsdam in Germany, if the humans directly intertwined with a given ecosystem are the ones involved in saving it. Planting mangroves is one example of EbA. Others include reforestation to eliminate food insecurity in Mexico, the establishment of no-fishing areas, and the clearing of litter in urban areas in South Africa.