Guyana Mangrove Restoration Programme — Nature-Based Sea Defence vs. Concrete Seawalls

Roughly 90% of Guyana's population and most of its economic activity sit on a low-lying coastal strip below sea level at high tide, historically protected by a chain of concrete and earthen seawalls that the government has said costs on the order of USD 14 million per year to inspect, repair and reinforce. Since the early 2010s, Guyana's National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) has run a Mangrove Restoration Project, initially supported through the EU's Global Climate Change Alliance, planting and protecting mangroves as a lower-maintenance, self-repairing alternative and complement to hard sea defences. Government figures cite more than 500,000 mangrove seedlings produced and over 500 hectares of coastal mangrove added across Regions Two, Four, Five and Six, contributing to a national mangrove cover above 21,000 hectares.

In 2022–2023, NAREI partnered with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), funded by the Korea Forest Service, to design a green-grey pilot at Dantzig and De Hoop in Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice), engaging engineering firms Royal HaskoningDHV and Deltares to combine roughly 120 hectares of mangrove restoration with limited hard structures. The pilot is designed to protect about 1,000 hectares of agricultural land from sea-level rise, directly benefit an estimated 500 residents, and is projected to help avoid around 1.12 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent over 25 years.

Caveats: the 2022–2023 green-grey pilot figures are pre-implementation design estimates, not measured outcomes; mangrove survival and erosion-control performance in Guyana's high-sediment, low-wave-energy coast differs from more exposed coastlines and is not the subject of a published long-term monitoring study; and the cited seawall maintenance cost is a government figure used to justify the programme rather than an independently audited comparison.

Read the full analysis: https://www.dpi.gov.gy/govt-invested-200m-to-restore-sustain-mangroves/