Restoring the Sundarbans with tiger widows of Jharkhali, West Bengal

In the disappearing islands of the Sundarbans — where the Bay of Bengal swallows land faster than communities can rebuild — a group of women are doing something extraordinary. They are planting mangroves.

These are not ordinary women. Many are tiger widows — women who lost their husbands to tiger attacks while fishing in the world's largest mangrove forest. Left without income, land or social security, they faced a future as precarious as the eroding mudflats beneath their feet. SEED saw in their grief not just vulnerability, but untapped power.

For over a decade, SEED has worked with these women to restore degraded coastal land across the Sundarbans — a UNESCO World Heritage Site now facing an existential crisis. Rising seas, recurring cyclones and saline intrusion are destroying mangrove cover at an alarming rate, collapsing embankments, poisoning agricultural land and pushing thousands of families into acute poverty. Ghoramara Island has shrunk from 9 sq. km to barely 3.5 sq. km since 1972. The clock is running out.

Since 2012, SEED's community-led restoration programme has planted over 1.5 million mangrove saplings across 25 hectares, achieving an 80% survival rate through a model that is as much about social justice as ecology. Fifty indigenous women lead every stage — from collecting seeds in the forest to managing nurseries, planting saplings in tidal mudflats, and monitoring survival using portable GPS devices. Their traditional knowledge of tides, soils and native species shapes restoration decisions that no outside expert could replicate. Ten native mangrove species have been reestablished — including the threatened Heritiera fomes — rebuilding biodiversity in areas previously reduced to barren, saline wasteland.

The work delivers results that compound. Restored mangroves stabilise eroding embankments, buffer cyclone-force winds and storm surges, reduce soil salinity and create breeding grounds for fish, crabs and prawns — directly protecting the livelihoods of fishing families who depend on these ecosystems. Each hectare restored reduces the risk of flooding for hundreds of households. Each woman trained becomes a permanent steward of the land she helped heal.

The active Jharkhali site currently covers 4 hectares with 10,000 saplings established. The G20 grant will scale restoration to an additional 4 hectares, support 30 more women through the programme, and — critically — fund the GPS mapping, soil monitoring, and independent impact assessment that will produce the first formally verified ecological record of SEED's work. This documentation is the unlock: it transforms a proven grassroots model into investable evidence, opening pathways to carbon finance, international conservation grants and government adoption at landscape scale.

The challenges are real. Cyclones can destroy a season's planting overnight. Saline water intrusion threatens sapling survival. Climate displacement pushes families off islands before restoration roots can take hold. But SEED has navigated every cyclone since Aila in 2009 — rebuilding, replanting and recommitting each time. The communities have not left. The women have not stopped.

Tripti Jana, 34, lost her husband to a tiger attack and survived on irregular fishing income before joining SEED's programme. Today she earns from poultry, a kitchen garden, nursery work and mangrove seed collection. She says the project gave her "both hands to work and a voice to speak." Multiply her story by fifty women, then two hundred families, then the entire Jharkhali coast — and you begin to understand what restoration really means here. It is not just an ecological act. It is a act of survival, dignity and defiance against forces — climate change, poverty, marginalisation — that conspire to erase both a people and a landscape.

The Sundarbans cannot wait. Support this work.