Asociación Mangle: Restoring El Salvador's Largest Mangrove Forest

Asociación Mangle organizes fishing families and farmers around the Xiriualtique-Jiquilisco Biosphere Reserve, home to Central America's largest remaining mangrove forest, to restore tidal channels choked off by decades of sediment buildup. Using Ecological Mangrove Restoration methods, more than 300 local residents have manually cleared over 4.2 kilometers of waterways and helped natural regeneration return to roughly 70 hectares of degraded mangrove. The group also runs women-led agroecology and food-security programs and youth organizing work across a dozen villages in the Bajo Lempa region, an area where some 6,000 families depend directly on the wetland's fish and shellfish.