Water, Wetlands
Mangrove Restoration in the Mallorquín Swamp, Colombia
Barranquilla is Colombia’s fourth largest city, and population expansion in and around the city has created numerous environmental problems.
Project Details
Barranquilla is Colombia’s fourth largest city, and urban expansion both in and around the city has created a number of environmental problems. Encroachment on the Mallorquín Swamp, on the northern edge of the city, has made residents more vulnerable to climate change and harmed livelihoods.
Mangroves in the swamp have historically provided significant value by mitigating floods, protecting biodiversity and fisheries, storing carbon, and supporting tourism. However, urban development and waste disposal have damaged this vital ecosystem and limited its capacity to provide these services.
To address this, Barranquilla Verde (the city’s environmental authority) is looking to restore mangroves in the Mallorquín Swamp, supported by World Resources Institute Colombia, as part of the BiodiverCities initiative. We produced an integrated cost-benefit analysis to assess the monetized social, economic, and environmental outcomes of restoration over 20 years.
We assessed:
- Nature-Based Infrastructure scenario, consisting of mangroves planting across 2.89 hectares of swamp in 2019 and 5.75 hectares in 2021. Informal developments are relocated out of the swamp and flow from the Magdalena River is partially restored.
- Grey infrastructure scenario, consisting of a seawall, wastewater treatment infrastructure, and renewable power generation.
- We assessed both scenarios with increasing levels of tourism uptake. For the NBI scenario, an eco-park is established, and ecotourism is promoted as a source of income, while tourism infrastructure is developed in the grey scenario.
Our assessment found that NBI in the Mallorquín Swamp creates more value for society, at a lower cost, than the grey infrastructure alternatives. The restored swamp could support the local economy and provide significant climate adaptation benefits.
The report is complemented by technical appendices with methodological details about the system dynamics model and spatial analysis that were developed for the valuation.
