The Oceans Are Coming Ashore.

• Author: Hinrichsen, Don

Wilson Vailoces stands knee deep in mud as he inspects his prized stand of red mangrove trees--trees that he planted himself over a decade ago on the tidal flats in front of his house. Vailoces lives just north of Bais Bay on the southeast coast of the Philippine island of Negros. His mangroves are intended to reduce erosion of his waterfront property, and to provide breeding, feeding, and nursery areas for a wealth of commercially valuable marine life, such as shrimp and milkfish. The going is tough and he lurches from side to side like a ship in a gale, grabbing the roots of his "trees on stilts" to steady himself.

A decade ago, the coast here was eroding, and valuable stocks of fish and shellfish had been depleted by over-fishing, which sometimes involved the use of explosives and poisons. "We had cut down all the mangroves and reduced most of our reefs to rubble by dynamite fishing," explains Vailoces, a self-educated small-scale fisher, who had to drop out of grade school to help his father pull a fitful living from the sea. Faced with the total collapse of his way of life, Vailoces decided he had to take the initiative to rebuild the region's resources if there was to be any future for his children. And the only way to do that, in his view, was to plant mangroves.

Vailoces began his mangrove rehabilitation project with help from the marine laboratory at nearby Silliman University in Dumaguete City. After his neighbors saw how well the mangroves worked as natural fish farms and shore stabilizers, they followed his lead. Lush mangrove forests now cover 100 hectares of coastal land in Bindoy Municipality. By the late 1990s, over 100,000 trees had been planted-one-tenth of them by Vailoces himself.

Vailoces didn't stop with mangroves. He also built and sank 1,000 artificial reefs made from bamboo, tires, or concrete. Designed as large pyramids, they provide excellent cover for a host of marine life. And he began working with local farmers, in an effort to convince them to use less harmful pesticides on their mangos and other fruit crops. He also turned his attention to the steep hills above the coast, where subsistence farmers eke a living from the highly unstable soils; Vailoces persuaded the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources to encourage the farmers to surround their fields with trees, which help stabilize the slopes. "Great damage had been done to coastal fisheries from landslides and siltation due to deforestation in the hills," he explains. "Coral reefs were buried and mangroves inundated. But we managed to turn that situation around."

Or so he thought. "Unfortunately, the mangroves have not continued their seaward march. They are expanding laterally up the coast, but not towards the sea," observes Vailoces, standing waist-deep in seawater. "We simply never anticipated the effects of sea level rise caused by global climate change. By now these red mangroves should have been moving out another 20 feet or so," he says, pointing seaward. "But they haven't been able to get a solid foothold because the waves are running in higher and with more force."

The subtle, inexorable rise in sea level has already had an effect on the Bindoy coast. "I can't tell you how much the sea level has risen here, but it is discernable," says Vailoces. Already, storm surges at high tide almost reach the floor boards of his house, which sits on short, half-meter pilings atop a small hill. Computer models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that a 1-meter rise in sea level could occur by 2080. Well before then, it seems, the Vailoces family may have to abandon their land and livelihood, and flee inland. "We would be completely swamped here by a 1-meter rise," he laments. "Even a half-meter rise would cause serious erosion problems, despite the protection afforded by the mangroves, and storm surges would routinely waterlog us."

On the other side of the world, rising sea levels are eroding the beaches and wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay, the huge inlet along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast that contains the largest body of brackish water in North America. Maryland, the state that contains most of the bay's shoreline, is now on the front lines of climate change. On the state's eastern shore, the 8,100-hectare Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge has lost close to one-third of its land area over the past three decades, and many once rich bottomland farms are now either waterlogged or too saline to sustain crops. Out in the bay, Maryland's Smith Island--actually a little archipelago 13 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide--has lost about 490 hectares over the past century; land that was wooded a generation ago is now salt marsh.

More and more of Maryland's natural shoreline is disappearing behind a bulwark of revetments and bulkheads. According to the the U.S. Environmental Protection...