Blue Carbon · Panama

Panama Counts Its Mangroves, and What It Has Lost

The environment ministry puts national cover at roughly 183,774 hectares and estimates that half the original extent has gone in fifty years. The figures are ministry claims, and the number itself has moved. In Darien, a UNESCO project is testing something harder than replanting: working out why the trees died in the first place.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

On 26 July, the international day set aside for mangrove ecosystems, Panama’s Ministry of Environment released a set of numbers about the country’s coastal forests. Roughly 183,774 hectares of mangrove across the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Six wetlands of international importance. A target of 1,800 hectares recovered within three years. And, running underneath all of it, an estimate that Panama has lost close to half its original mangrove cover over the past fifty years.

Those figures are worth reporting. They are also worth attributing carefully, because every one of them comes from MiAMBIENTE itself rather than from an independent assessment, and because the headline number has not held still.

What the ministry is claiming

The 26 July release, issued through the ministry’s National Directorate of Coasts and Seas, frames Panama’s mangroves primarily as a climate asset. A single hectare of mangrove, the ministry says, can hold up to four times the carbon of a terrestrial tropical forest, most of it locked in waterlogged soil rather than in the trees themselves. That places Panama among the countries in the region with the greatest coastal carbon storage capacity.

Digna Barsallo, the ministry’s national director of coasts and seas, connected that storage to money. Blue carbon reduces greenhouse gas concentrations, she said, and at the same time opens access to climate finance mechanisms in a global picture where natural ecosystems are increasingly treated as measurable environmental assets.

The framing was echoed days earlier, when Panama hosted the third Congress of the Mangroves of the Americas under the theme of united roots and interlinked futures.

Panama has a responsibility and also a privilege.

Oscar Vallarino, Vice Minister of Environment, July 2026

Barsallo also warned that the country’s storage capacity is under threat, and the pressure she describes is specific. The ministry attributes the loss of roughly half the original cover over five decades to three drivers: the expansion of agro-industrial activity, unplanned real estate development, and pollution from various sources. Each of those has diminished the forests’ function as carbon sinks and weakened them as physical barriers against extreme weather.

Why the headline number keeps moving

Here the reporting needs a caveat that the press release does not carry. The figure of 183,774 hectares is precise to the single hectare, which lends it an air of settled fact. It is not settled.

MiAMBIENTE’s own earlier communications give different totals. One ministry page puts national cover at more than 183,000 hectares, of which 169,458 hectares sit on the Pacific littoral and the remainder on the Caribbean, together representing 2.44 percent of national vegetation cover. Another, from an earlier year, gives more than 165,000 hectares. A separate ministry statement issued in July 2026, around the third Congress of the Mangroves of the Americas hosted by Panama, uses 183,800 hectares and notes that twelve mangrove species are present in the country.

None of this is evidence of bad faith. Mangrove extent is genuinely difficult to measure. The ministry has said that improved tools and training allowed surveyors to include insular territories that earlier assessments had missed, which alone would move the total upward. But it does mean readers should treat 183,774 as the ministry’s current best estimate rather than as a fixed quantity, and should be sceptical of any comparison across years that does not account for the method changing underneath it.

The same caution applies with more force to the fifty-year loss estimate. Half of the original cover is a large claim, and the ministry release does not identify the baseline survey it is measured against.

What the legal architecture actually covers

Panama’s mangroves sit inside six wetlands listed under the Ramsar Convention, which designates sites of international importance for their ecological value and their role in sustaining biodiversity.

Domestic protection rests on Law 41 of 1998, the General Environment Law, and on Law 304 of 2022, which sets out measures for the protection of coral reefs, seagrass beds and associated marine and coastal ecosystems. The ministry has also said it is working toward a dedicated mangrove law that would consolidate provisions currently scattered across several instruments.

The 1,800 hectare target, read precisely

The restoration figure deserves a closer reading than it usually gets. The ministry describes it as an aim to recover 1,800 hectares over three years, and it sits inside a governance process rather than a construction schedule. That process involves harmonising the various mangrove regulations with the International Platform for Ocean Sustainability, working through a multidisciplinary expert group, and consulting across sectors.

In other words, the number is an aspiration attached to a policy harmonisation exercise. It is not, on the evidence of the release, a funded and sited restoration programme with hectares already allocated. That distinction matters for anyone planning to cite the target, and it is the kind of thing that gets flattened when a ministry statement is summarised into a headline.

Darien, and the case for diagnosis before planting

The more instructive story is smaller and further from the capital. In the Darien Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO project is building a mangrove restoration strategy around the communities of Garachine, and its starting premise is one that mangrove restoration has historically got wrong.

Rather than beginning with seedlings, the project applies forensic ecology to identify the underlying causes of mangrove degradation and loss at the site. The logic is straightforward and, in restoration circles, hard won: planting into conditions that killed the previous generation of trees produces expensive failure. Clarifying the ecological drivers first is what allows interventions to be grounded in how a specific site actually behaves.

The interventions that follow are correspondingly physical. The project aims to recover degraded vegetation in what are locally called albina zones, hypersaline flats where mangrove has died back, encouraging natural regeneration rather than relying solely on planting. It works on restoring hydrology by clearing and rehabilitating the channels that connect those zones, on the reasoning that water flow, not seedling supply, is usually the binding constraint. And it uses structures known as tarquinas placed in fringing mangrove to stabilise sediment and give seedlings a chance to establish.

The setting justifies the effort. Darien’s mangroves cover 5,493 hectares, the second largest extent in Panama, with trees reaching up to 35 metres. Seven species are present there: red mangrove Rhizophora mangle, gentleman giant mangrove Rhizophora racemosa, black mangrove Avicennia germinans, bicolor black mangrove Avicennia bicolor, white mangrove Laguncularia racemosa, buttonwood Conocarpus erectus, and tea mangrove.

A national chapter, and who built it

Panama has also established a national chapter of the Global Mangrove Alliance, the network that now counts more than 100 member organisations and fourteen national chapters working toward halting mangrove loss and restoring degraded areas by 2030.

The provenance is worth stating rather than burying. The chapter was established within the framework of the Blue Natural Heritage project, led by the National Audubon Society together with the Audubon Society of Panama. That is a non-governmental initiative that the ministry is reporting as a national achievement, which is normal enough, but readers tracking who does the work should know where it originated.

What to watch

Three things would move Panama’s mangrove position from statement to substance. First, publication of the survey methodology and baseline behind both the 183,774 hectare figure and the fifty-year loss estimate, so that future counts can be compared honestly. Second, movement on the dedicated mangrove law, which would replace a scattered set of provisions with a single instrument. Third, evidence that the 1,800 hectare target has been sited, costed and funded rather than announced.

The Darien work suggests the technical understanding is present in the country. Whether it scales beyond a biosphere reserve is a question of money and law, not of ecology.

The mangrove figures in this article are claims made by Panama’s Ministry of Environment in its statement of 26 July 2026, marking the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem, and are attributed as such throughout. Details of the Darien restoration project come from UNESCO’s project page for the Darien Biosphere Reserve.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean