The Sundarbans — the world's largest mangrove forest, straddling the delta where the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers pour into the Bay of Bengal — is the last stronghold of the Bengal tiger in the wild. Around 500 tigers live there, swimming between islands through brackish water, hunting spotted deer and wild boar through a labyrinth of tidal channels and salt-tolerant forest.
It is also one of the most climate-vulnerable landscapes on Earth. Sea-level rise, intensifying cyclones, and salt intrusion are eating at the mangrove edges year by year. And for decades, legal and illegal clearing for shrimp farming and fuelwood reduced forest cover further.
The restoration is now being led, in significant part, by women.
100,000 Trees
Women's self-help groups in the Indian state of West Bengal and in southern Bangladesh have planted over 100,000 mangrove saplings in degraded Sundarbans shorelines since 2020, with the pace accelerating dramatically in 2025 and early 2026. The effort spans dozens of villages across both countries, coordinated through a network of women-led conservation groups with support from the Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF-India, and the IUCN's Mangrove Specialist Group.
The work is unglamorous and physically demanding. Women wade into tidal mud at low water, positioning propagules — the pencil-sized seedlings that mangroves produce naturally — into the sediment at precise intervals. They monitor survival rates, protect young trees from grazing by spotted deer, and maintain records of which species are taking hold in which microhabitats.
The results are visible. Satellite imagery of restoration sites shows new forest canopy closing over previously bare mudflats. Monitoring surveys have detected Bengal tiger pugmarks — paw prints — in restored forest sections that had no recorded tiger activity for years.
Why Women?
The involvement of women in this work is not accidental. Research across mangrove-dependent communities consistently finds that women are the primary collectors of non-timber forest products — crabs, molluscs, medicinal plants, fuelwood — and therefore have the strongest direct knowledge of forest health and the greatest economic stake in its recovery. When mangroves degrade, it is women's livelihoods that suffer first.
Women's self-help groups, already organised for microfinance and income-generation, have proven to be highly effective vehicles for conservation work. "They don't need to be convinced that the forest matters," one project coordinator told conservation.org. "They already know. They just need resources and recognition."
The project also provides employment. Women are paid for their restoration work — a point that has been central to its expansion. Conservation that improves immediate household income is conservation that continues.
The Climate Stakes
Mangroves are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, sequestering three to five times as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests. They also provide the most effective natural protection against storm surges — communities with intact mangrove coastlines suffered significantly less damage in Cyclone Amphan (2020) and Cyclone Remal (2024) than those where the forest had been cleared.
Restored Sundarbans mangroves serve all of these functions at once: tiger habitat, carbon sink, coastal shield, nursery for commercial fish species, and livelihood for the 4.5 million people who live in the delta's tidal margins.
The 100,000-sapling milestone is not an endpoint. Community groups have announced targets to plant a further 200,000 saplings before the 2026 monsoon season, focusing on the most severely degraded eastern shorelines of the Indian Sundarbans and on restoring connectivity corridors between tiger territories currently fragmented by shrimp pond development.
Sources: Conservation International; WWF-India; Wildlife Conservation Society; conservation.org, January 2026; Positive.news, March 2026
