Plant and protect 12,000 mangroves on the Lamu coast

Most mangrove planting fails, and everyone knows why

Mangrove restoration has a survival problem. Published survival rates for community planting projects across East Africa sit somewhere between fifteen and forty per cent at three years, and the reason is rarely the planting. It is what happens in months four to thirty-six: seedlings get grazed, cut for fuel, silted over, or planted in the wrong zone for the species and drown quietly.

We have been working on this stretch of the Lamu coast since 2021 and our own first planting, in the naive version of this project, came in at thirty-one per cent. The current sites are running at eighty-four per cent at three years. The difference is not technique. It is that we now pay eleven people to look after them.

What we are doing differently

Twelve thousand seedlings across nine hectares, matched by species to the tidal zone rather than planted uniformly, raised in two community nurseries, and monitored by a paid guardian team drawn from the four villages that use the creek. Three years of guardianship is funded up front and non-negotiable, because a restoration project that funds planting and hopes for protection is a photograph, not a forest.

• Nine hectares across four sites, all degraded through historic cutting rather than natural loss.
• Four species matched to tidal zone, raised locally rather than trucked in.
• Eleven paid guardians from the four adjacent villages, for three full years.
• Survival counted by transect at 6, 12, 24 and 36 months and published whatever it says.

What the money buys

Roughly sixty per cent of this budget is people rather than plants, and that ratio is the entire argument of the project.

• $21,600 — Three years of guardian wages Eleven people, part-time, from the four villages that use the creek. This is the line that most projects do not have.
• $11,400 — Two community nurseries and 12,000 seedlings Propagation, shade structures, and the labour to raise seedlings to planting size locally.
• $7,800 — Site preparation and hydrology works Clearing three blocked channels, without which two of the four sites will silt and fail regardless of what we plant.
• $5,300 — Monitoring, transects and reporting Four survey rounds over three years, with an independent ecologist on two of them.
• $4,600 — Boats, fuel and equipment Two small boats and their running costs, because three of the four sites are only reachable by water.
• $3,200 — Community agreements, training and platform fees Formal use agreements with the four villages, and training for the guardian team.

Our first planting survived at thirty-one per cent. The only thing we changed was paying eleven people to care about it, and it went to eighty-four.

Who is behind this

Tidewater Climate Trust is a small UK charity working on coastal restoration, led by Karl Sorensen, a marine ecologist who has spent twelve years on this coastline and the previous eight getting it wrong elsewhere. The work is delivered with a Lamu-based community forest association that holds the statutory use rights; they employ the guardians and we fund them. The independent monitoring is done by a university team that has no financial interest in the survival figures being good.

Risks and challenges

The obvious risk is survival, and we would rather set the expectation honestly: eighty-four per cent is our current performance and we are budgeting on the assumption that these sites will do slightly worse, because two of them are more exposed. Storm damage in the first eighteen months is the single largest threat and there is no mitigation beyond replanting, for which we hold a reserve of about 1,800 seedlings. The channel clearing needs a permit from the county that we have applied for and not yet received. The deeper risk is what happens in year four, when guardian funding ends, and the honest answer is that we are working on a carbon finance route to continue it and it is not yet secured.