Sharjah24 – Reuters: In Brazil, a mangrove bursting with life where a landfill that received 7,500 tons of waste per day used to exist.
In 1997, biologist Mario Moscatelli set to restore this mangrove-turned-into-landfill.
Although mangroves were legally protected since 1965, in 1975 the growing urbanization of Rio de Janeiro took 1,300 hectares of the mangrove to dump waste generated in the capital city's metropolitan area, the Gramcho region.
"From an environmental and technical perspective, it doesn't make sense – it is not a suitable place, not only for environmental reasons but also for legal ones. But that was back in the ’70s and it happened this way," Moscatelli said.
After decades of hard work, the Gramacho mangrove, near Rio de Janeiro, is an outstanding successful case that proves it is possible to restore wildlife in what used to be a consume-and-waste era landscape.
“For the last three months, we assess 1,500 tons (3,306,934 lbs) of rubbish have been dumped to the bay and probably, it will never be removed from there. This is our big problem, and it takes a lot of time and resources to restore mangroves. If we don't preserve these areas, it's impossible to have them restored,” Moscatelli added.
Mangroves help fight the climate crisis because a large part of coastal biodiversity depends on them and they absorb nitrogen and phosphorus from polluted waters and sewage.
These ecosystems also absorb four times as much and accumulate ten times as much carbon as any forest.
Growing urban areas and a lax environmental-rules enforcement represent its biggest threats.
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