Kuwait's EPA Mangrove Rehabilitation — Jahra Reserve & Sulaibikhat Bay Blue-Carbon Coastline

Kuwait's Environment Public Authority (EPA) has worked since the 1990s to re-establish Avicennia marina mangroves at Sulaibikhat Bay and, more recently, Jahra Nature Reserve. Earlier afforestation attempts in the 1960s–70s failed outright; post-1990 plantings in protected embayments survived, with trees reaching roughly 2.5 metres in height after seven years — the basis for today's expanded effort.
Recent activity has been incremental rather than large-scale: in September 2025 the volunteer group "We Plant and Protect", working with the EPA and Saudi Arabian partners, donated close to 5,000 mangrove seedlings and seeds grown in EPA laboratories for staged transplanting; a further planting event at Jahra Nature Reserve in 2026 involved roughly 4,000 seedlings, with EPA aiming to restore the reserve's mangrove ecosystem by 2035 in cooperation with the UAE embassy, Kuwait Oil Company and local volunteers.
The evidence base has real limits, honestly noted here: a 2025 peer-reviewed review of Middle Eastern mangroves states plainly that "Kuwait and Iraq still have no self-sustaining native mangrove populations", meaning survival depends on continued human intervention rather than natural regeneration. Sulaibikhat Bay itself is a contaminated coastline (hydrocarbons, heavy metals, suspended particles), which complicates long-term establishment, and no site-specific carbon-sequestration or biodiversity-survey figures were found in the literature reviewed.

Read the full analysis: https://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/kuwait-launches-mangrove-project-to-protect-coasts-and-biodiversity/