Sundarbans Forest Co-Management — Village Conservation Forums & Community Patrol Groups (Bangladesh)

The Sundarbans, the world's largest contiguous mangrove forest (about 10,000 km², some 60% of it in Bangladesh), has been governed since 2008 through a formal co-management system intended to reconcile biodiversity conservation with the livelihoods of the more than 18% of households in Bangladesh's southeastern coastal zone who depend on it, chiefly through fishing.

Co-management was introduced under USAID's Nishorgo Support Project (2008–2012) and consolidated through the Integrated Protected Area Co-management (IPAC) project from 2010. It rests on a four-tier local-to-national structure: Village Conservation Forums (VCF) and People's Forums (PF) at community level, Community Patrol Groups (CPG) for on-the-ground resource monitoring, and Co-management Committees (CMC) that link communities to the Bangladesh Forest Department.

IPAC recruited 643 village members into patrol groups; the follow-on USAID-funded CREL project (2008–present) recruited a further 185 community patrol members, with technical and financial support also provided by Germany's GIZ. Women participate at every tier, which researchers link to greater awareness of forest regulations, expanded social networks and new income-generating opportunities.

A 2024 peer-reviewed evaluation in the journal Ecology & Society assessed the programme from local forest users' perspectives and reported a mixed picture: it found genuine gains in community engagement and monitoring capacity, but also documented persistent limitations, including over-exploitation of resources, poor recruitment of key native tree species, habitat degradation, invasive species, and areas where local ecological knowledge was not adequately incorporated into decision-making.

No programme-specific carbon-sequestration or soil/water-retention data is reported; the strongest evidence lies in the governance structure itself — its scale, institutional backing and independent peer-reviewed evaluation — rather than in quantified ecological outcomes.