Everglades Mangroves Build Resilience for Coastal Communities
- The Everglades Foundation
- Jul 26
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 14
July 26, 2025
During a severe rainstorm, how important are umbrellas, rain boots, and a roof over your head? We often think that these things are the key to keeping us safe and dry. What about coastal regions across the world? These highly vulnerable places frequently bear the brunt of flooding from increasingly intense tropical storms, accompanying storm surges, and extreme weather events. What keeps densely populated coastal cities safe and dry?
The obvious answers that come to mind may be floodwalls, levees, seawalls, or storm gates. And those may certainly be needed, but in appropriate places and under certain circumstances. Hardened infrastructure is not the only solution. Along with built infrastructure, we need a formidable, natural ally—one that is strong enough to help us cope with the numerous coastal risks.
If you live in South Florida, you can count yourself among the fortunate few to be kept safe by the powerful natural ally—Everglades mangroves! They are nature-based solutions that not only protect coastal communities and ecosystems from extreme events but also effectively sequester carbon dioxide to mitigate further impacts.
How do mangroves help coastal communities cope with the impacts of coastal flooding?
Thick belts of mangrove forests, with their complex root systems and dense canopies, have the unique ability to dissipate the energy of oncoming storm surges, reducing the depth and extent of flooding. As a result, homes, roads, and communities behind mangroves are often spared the worst damages from flooding.
Florida’s coastline has over 900 square miles of mangrove forests. The Everglades is home to nearly 550 square miles of mangrove forests along our southern coastline. These Everglades mangroves, the largest contiguous mangrove forest in North America, form a formidable natural infrastructure against large waves and storm surges, stabilizing the shores against erosion.
Without this natural barrier, Hurricane Wilma’s floodwaters would have reached 70% farther inland, devastating the wetlands behind the mangroves. More recently, when Hurricane Irma impacted South Florida in 2017, mangroves saved the region $725 million in property damage by reducing flooding by 14%. And again in 2022, when Hurricane Ian landed, mangroves cut storm surge damage by nearly 30%—saving an incredible $4.1 billion to people in South Florida!
How do mangroves make Florida more resilient now and in the future?
Interestingly, the incredible strength and power of mangroves comes from their ability to draw down significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and store it as biomass and soil sediments. While all plants take up carbon dioxide to photosynthesize, mangroves’ ability to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide is nearly four times larger than terrestrial forests.
The mangroves’ dead roots, along with dead leaves and branches that fall on the forest floor, form the bulk of the organic matter below ground. Coastal waters cover the fallen organic matter, shielding it from physical and chemical degradation, and locking away stored carbon for centuries and millennia. By sequestering and storing significant amounts of carbon, mangroves play a critical role in creating resilience for our communities.
Everglades mangroves are well known for sheltering diverse species, supporting fisheries, and enriching our culture and economies. But now, more than ever, we recognize them as a powerful nature-based solution that is helping us cope with and mitigate coastal risks. Everglades restoration will ensure that South Florida's mangroves continue to thrive and protect us through the increased southerly flow of clean freshwater which is vital for the health of mangroves.
Article References
Zhang, K., Liu, H., Li, Y., Xu, H., Shen, J., Rhome, J. and Smith III, T.J., 2012. The role of mangroves in attenuating storm surges. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 102, pp.11-23.
Narayan, S., Thoma, C.J., Nzerem, K., Matthewman, J., Shepard, C., Geselbracht, L. and Beck, M.W., 2025. The spatially variable effects of mangroves on flood depths and losses from storm surges in Florida. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09078.
Wang, M., Zhang, T., Xie, Y., Zhang, Z. and Wu, X., 2025. Mapping accumulated carbon storage of global mangroves from 2000 to 2020 at a 1 km resolution. Scientific Data, 12(1), p.552.
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