Climate change threats to seagrass, mangrove and saltmarsh

Why is this project important?

Mangroves and saltmarsh are critically important to the healthy function of NSW estuaries. They provide many benefits to our estuaries including improving water quality, flood mitigation and bank stabilisation, as well as providing essential habitat for important recreational and commercial fisheries and serving as a highly efficient carbon sink.

The ability of mangroves and saltmarsh to protect estuary banks and infrastructure from erosion from storms, wave action and flood events will prove increasingly important to protecting coastal settlements from the increase in frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change.

Over the past two centuries of coastal zone development in NSW, mangroves and saltmarsh have been under pressure from clearing, drainage and reclamation, and inappropriate use.

The mangrove and saltmarsh wetlands remaining across our NSW coast are facing new pressures from current and future climate change.

These climate change related pressures include sea level rise, changing catchment hydrology (flooding and droughts), and evolving estuary entrance conditions.

You can find out more about mangroves and saltmarsh and climate change in Australia here.

What are we doing? 

In response to these emerging threats to mangroves and saltmarsh, we are undertaking assessments of the vulnerability of these important ecosystems to sea level rise and climate change across NSW to identify estuaries most at risk. This will inform a prioritisation of efforts to help mangrove and saltmarsh areas adapt to climate change.

The images below show current mapped areas of mangrove and saltmarsh (A) in the Clyde River adjacent to a map of projected mangrove and saltmarsh areas following a sea level rise of 1 m (B).

Mangroves are shown as yellow and saltmarsh is red in these 2 images.