Mangroves, money & memory, what the data says about coastal restoration
We pulled five years of YPL field data. The most-funded projects weren't always the ones that worked.
Between 2021 and 2026 we tracked 84 coastal restoration projects across the YPL network, mostly mangrove and seagrass work in West Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. We finally had enough data to ask an uncomfortable question, does funding actually predict survival?
The short answer is no, not in any clean linear way. The projects with the highest 5-year survival rates clustered around three factors that have almost nothing to do with grant size, local labour hired per hectare, frequency of follow-up site visits, and whether the lead organiser still lives within 20km of the site.
We're not arguing money doesn't matter. We're arguing that money without continuity is mostly photographs. The full dataset and methodology are available on request.
