It’s mid-July, and heavy monsoon rains lash the coast of Maharashtra. Kailas Gawand meets us in Mankule, four kilometres from his village of Hashiware. Here he points towards the submerged landscape around his village, much of which becomes difficult to reach during the rainy season. Gawand recalls how a coastal bund failed in 1990, allowing seawater to inundate what was once fertile agricultural land in the area.
But the intrusion of seawater has also transformed the landscape. Saltwater mangroves, which can buffer the coast from storms, began taking root on abandoned farmlands, including Gawand’s two-hectare plot. Hashiware and its surrounding areas have since survived powerful cyclones making land on India’s western coast, including Nisarga in 2020 and Tauktae in 2021.
“Mangroves have been a blessing for our village,” the 50-year-old tells Dialogue Earth.
In 2021, Gawand was offered financial incentives to protect the mangroves on his land by a Pune-based NGO working in partnership with the Indian arm of US tech company Apple to aid mangrove conservation in Maharashtra.
He was the first in his village to sign a conservation agreement with them, under which land ownership remained unchanged. Since then, around 100 agreements have been signed by others in the village, according to Gawand and the NGO in question, the Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF).
Across India, a number of companies have been financing mangrove conservation, though there is no publicly available registry of corporate mangrove initiatives.
Apple deployed US$ 200 million to support nature-based carbon removal projects globally, including the Hashiware and Mankule mangrove conservation. Indian multinational conglomerate Godrej Enterprises Group invests between INR 8-10 million (US$ 84,000-105,000) annually in mangrove conservation, according to its head of environmental sustainability, Tejashree Joshi, and has been protecting mangroves around Vikhroli township in Mumbai for decades.
And in 2025, US e-commerce company Amazon allocated US$ 1.2 million towards mangrove protection and flamingo habitat restoration in Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Despite differing approaches, these three projects share a striking feature: none currently generate carbon credits.
This sets India apart from several mangrove conservation projects globally. Kenya’s Mikoko Pamoja generates at least 3,000 carbon credits annually – each representing a metric tonne of CO2 equivalent avoided.
It earns around US$ 130,000 a year for local community projects. In Colombia, Vida Manglar is expected to sequester nearly 1 million tonnes of carbon over 30 years through carbon credits. Ghana’s Keta Lagoon mangrove project, meanwhile, could generate 2.3 million carbon credits over 40 years.
Dialogue Earth met with some multinational companies and their mangrove conservation partners in India. They said they are currently focused on conservation, biodiversity and improving community livelihoods rather than carbon credits.
Experts say there is room for these projects to evolve into structured “blue carbon” initiatives – referring to the carbon captured and stored by the world’s ocean and coastal ecosystems. To do so, they will need to build scientific knowledge, improve monitoring systems and develop community partnerships needed for carbon markets.
The mangrove conservation projects are “a good stepping stone for companies entering into the carbon market”, says carbon market lawyer Avadhi Jain. Through such projects, “they [get to] understand what the landscape is, what can be done and what cannot be done”.
Conservation before accreditation makes business sense
Mangroves are among the most carbon-efficient ecosystems, with studies estimating they can sequester 6-8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per hectare, or about four times more than terrestrial forests. Mangrove forests also help buffer coastlines from storms, reduce flood risks, support biodiversity and sustain communities that depend on coastal ecosystems.
For Godrej Enterprises Group, mangrove conservation began long before carbon markets became part of the climate conversation.
The company’s Vikhroli township mangrove conservation programme began in 1985. This area holds 23,000 tonnes of carbon as sequestered, according to Joshi. But despite measuring the carbon stored in its mangroves, it chose not to use those figures towards carbon neutrality claims.
For the company, Joshi says, protecting mangroves is part of “a long-term survival, a long-term climate priority, and… a long-term stewardship”.
Godrej carried out its first carbon assessment of its mangrove forests in 2013, and another in 2025 using methodologies approved by the UN climate convention, says Joshi.
Carbon projects require a longer-term commitment than many traditional conservation initiatives. “These would be high-quality credits. [But they] need time to generate,” Joshi says. “It’s patient capital.”
According to Jain, who is also a co-founder of the Climate and Law Initiative, carbon markets are designed to reward exactly this kind of long-term investment.
Jain says corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often treated as an annual corporate exercise, whereas carbon projects require companies to commit to much longer timeframes. While CSR-funded projects can continue for several years, their funding is often reviewed and allocated through annual budgeting cycles. Carbon projects, in contrast, require sustained investment over decades to establish baselines and monitor outcomes. “A carbon market brings longevity – you make sure the impact you’re creating today lasts for a while.”
She notes that conservation projects often become pilots helping companies understand ecological restoration before they consider larger or more formal carbon-market projects. “Many times, they learn from a conservation project as a case study and then build something similar somewhere else,” Jain says.
The limits of conservation funding
Amazon’s mangrove initiative represents another model of private investment in these ecosystems. The conglomerate is supporting a mangrove protection and flamingo habitat restoration project across Mumbai and Gujarat, through the non-profit Hasten Regeneration (soon to become Xylo Earth).
The project is a “philanthropic investment” with no carbon credits involved, Sheeba Sen, co-founder of Hasten Regeneration, confirmed to Dialogue Earth.
Sen believes philanthropy and CSR initiatives cannot deliver ecosystem restoration at the scale required across India. “Right now, it’s very fragmented,” she says. “It’ll be a CSR grant for two, three years, and some other grant for two, three years.”
Long-term private investment will be necessary to scale conservation efforts beyond individual projects, Sen says: “Private capital is a non-negotiable element of climate financing.”
But she cautions against valuing ecosystems only through carbon. “Carbon is a very narrow lens to look at nature [with],” Sen notes, arguing that biodiversity, livelihoods and ecosystem resilience must remain central to future conservation finance.
Kailas Gawand’s agreement with AERF, for instance, incentivises him to protect the mangrove ecosystem on his own land, offering him a source of income.
The Apple-supported AERF model focuses on conserving existing mangroves rather than restoring degraded areas through plantations. The organisation has co-signed more than 500 agreements across the coastal districts of Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg and Raigad in Maharashtra, protecting over 1,100 hectares of privately owned mangroves, according to Apple.
Putting a price on nature
In March 2026, India launched its carbon market portal, taking it one step closer to implementing its carbon credit trading scheme. It signals a shift. Mangrove conservation efforts in India are gradually moving beyond CSR, even if they are not yet structured as carbon projects, notes Manish Dabkara, chairperson and managing director of EKI Energy Services, a carbon credit developer and supplier.
Over time, Dabkara tells Dialogue Earth, many of the mangrove initiatives that are “positioned primarily as CSR, sustainability-driven, biodiversity or coastal resilience programmes [are] likely to evolve into structured blue carbon projects”.
For a project to generate carbon credits, experts Dialogue Earth spoke to say developers must establish scientific baselines, monitor ecosystems over time and verify carbon storage. They must also demonstrate that the climate benefits are additional, meaning they would not have happened without the intervention.
The existing blue carbon methodologies do not always fit AERF’s approach, according to the foundation’s joint director Jayant Sarnaik. “You have to prove that if you do not do this, they will be wiped out. We don’t want anything to be destroyed,” Sarnaik tells Dialogue Earth.
The key difference between CSR-funded conservation projects and carbon projects is that the latter include accountability to regulatory authorities and buyers, experts say. Conservation projects require monitoring and long-term engagement with communities to ensure agreements are upheld. Carbon projects, however, must meet additional verification and regulatory requirements before credits can be issued because they create a financial asset, Jain says. “Regulatory certainty is a very big aspect that an investor or financer for a carbon project would look into.”
Companies are also cautious because of greenwashing concerns and reputational risks associated with flawed carbon credit programmes, Jain says. They may prefer the conservation route because carbon projects attract much greater scrutiny. “The minute you do something in a commercial sense, it gets way more nuanced,” she points out. “People look at various angles, like methodology, additionality and community-sharing agreements.”
A functioning blue carbon market, according to Jain, would require strong safeguards, including monitoring, validation and verification systems to ensure that carbon finance supports genuine conservation outcomes. “The minute you make companies liable in some way and incentivise them to conserve ecosystems, that’s when conservation starts making long-term economic sense,” she says.
Dialogue Earth asked Apple whether it saw a future for blue carbon projects in India and whether it had explored them elsewhere. It replied by email that its 2018 partnership with Conservation International to protect and restore a mangrove forest in Colombia quantified blue carbon credits in trees and soil.
India’s blue carbon future
The transition from conservation projects to carbon assets will depend on how India designs its blue carbon framework.
Experts say the goal is not simply to create another market commodity, but to ensure that climate finance strengthens ecosystems that already provide value beyond carbon.
“Unless communities understand and accept the need to conserve and become partners in the whole process, we are not going to do anything,” Archana Godbole, director of AERF, tells Dialogue Earth.
The growing interest in financing mangrove conservation comes at a time when these ecosystems continue to face competing pressures from development and climate risks. The future of India’s mangroves may therefore depend on whether private finance can move beyond short-term sustainability commitments and support conservation as a long-term investment.
“We are far away from the reality where nature is protected simply on principle,” says Jain.
This story was supported by the Earth Journalism Network.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
