Taking other environmental and socioeconomic factors into account, villages with wider mangroves suffered significantly fewer deaths than ones with narrower or no mangroves.
In 1999 a super cyclone struck the eastern coast of India , leaving 10,000 people dead. At the time, the Orissa cyclone, named after the Indian state which it battered, was the deadliest storm in India in over a quarter century. However, according to a new study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the death toll would have been significantly higher if the mangrove forests buffeting the Indian villagers from the sea had not softened the cyclone’s blow.
Researchers from the University of Delhi and Duke University analyzed death tolls from 409 villages in the largely rural Kendrapada District. They compared each village’s mortality rates with the width of mangrove forests between the village and the open sea. Using statistical models, the researchers found that if mangroves had been lost entirely, deaths per village would have increased by 1.72.
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