Abstract
Climate change and anthropogenic activities threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Climate-smart conservation plans address these challenges by ensuring protection of some climate-resilient areas. However, integrating climate change in the design of conservation plans is often deemed too expensive, as it may require larger networks or protecting more costly sites from a conservation perspective. Using mangroves as a case study, we evaluate the efficiency of protecting mangroves in climate-smart versus climate-naïve reserve networks. We find that climate-smart conservation plans could provide sizable benefits (13.3%) for relatively moderate increases in protected area (+7.3%). Moreover, transboundary plans, involving cooperation among countries, require less area and protect more climate-resilient mangroves than nation-by-nation plans. Implementing these strategies would improve the current protected area network for mangroves, which currently has poor climate resilience. Our methodology could potentially be tested on other ecosystems, assuming sufficient information exists regarding their distribution, biodiversity, and resilience to climate change.
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Data availability
The datasets used in our study are publicly available online. These include: (1) the global map of mangroves is available for download from the Global Mangrove Watch53 website (https://www.globalmangrovewatch.org/); (2) IUCN distribution of mangrove species51 is available at: https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/spatial-data-download; (3) the global biophysical mangrove typology62 is available for download from a Zenodo repository: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8340259]68; and (4) the data on the probability of future mangrove loss (i.e., mangrove climate resilience) is available from a Zenodo repository: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13668500] The datasets generated during the current study are available at ref. 69: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17728764].
Code availability
Code to run the analysis in this study is currently available at: https://github.com/AlviDab/Mangroves_ClimateChange. The code is archived in a Zenodo digital repository69: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17728764].
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Acknowledgements
F.D.G. and K.J.T.E. were supported by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems – TROPIMUNDO, which is funded by the European Commission (EC contract N° 2019-1451). C.J.B. was supported by a Future Fellowship (FT210100792) from the Australian Research Council. J.F. received funding from the Waitt Institute.
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Conceptualisation, A.D., C.J.B, T.V.d.S, C.A.B., D.S.S., D.C.D., C.E.L., F.D.G., J.F. and A.J.R.; Methodology, A.D., C.J.B, T.V.d.S., C.A.B., D.S.S., D.C.D. and A.R.; Formal analysis, A.D. and J.E.; Writing – original draft, A.D.; Writing – review & editing, A.D., C.J.B., T.V.d.S., C.A.B., D.S.S., D.C.D., C.E.L., F.D.G., J.F., S.N., K.C.V.B., K.J.T.E. and A.J.R.
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Christopher J. Brown co-leads the Global Mangrove Alliance’s Science Working Group, an organisation dedicated to advancing mangrove conservation. No other authors have any competing interests.
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Dabalà, A., Brown, C.J., Van der Stocken, T. et al. Safeguarding climate-resilient mangroves requires only a moderate increase in the global protected area. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68877-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68877-4
