India’s Asiatic lion population has increased from 523 in 2015 to 891 in 2025, a 70.4% rise over a decade. Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav highlighted the increase on World Lion Day, August 10, crediting forest officials, conservationists and local communities for the recovery. The increase is an important conservation milestone. But for a species whose wild population remains concentrated in a relatively small geographical range, rising numbers are only part of the story.

The Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica) is one of India’s most significant wildlife conservation successes. Once found across parts of Asia, the subspecies was driven to near extinction by hunting and habitat loss. Its remaining wild population is now concentrated primarily in Gujarat’s Gir landscape and surrounding areas.

A Decade of Population Growth

India’s lion population increased from 523 in 2015 to 674 in 2020 and reached 891 in 2025. The latest increase represents a 70.4% growth over ten years.

The recovery reflects the impact of long-term protection, habitat management, prey availability, scientific monitoring and the involvement of communities living around lion habitats. But population size alone does not establish whether a species is fully secure.

For the Asiatic lion, where the animals live is almost as important as how many there are.

The Risk of a Concentrated Population

Unlike many large carnivore populations distributed across multiple countries and ecosystems, India’s Asiatic lions remain concentrated largely in Gujarat.

This creates a potential vulnerability. A major disease outbreak, extreme weather event, environmental contamination or other ecological disturbance affecting the Gir landscape could threaten a significant proportion of the population.

The risk became particularly evident during the 2018 canine distemper virus outbreak, when several Asiatic lions died. The episode demonstrated how infectious disease can become a serious conservation concern when a species is concentrated within a relatively limited landscape. Disease surveillance, veterinary care and monitoring have therefore become increasingly important alongside conventional habitat protection.

Why a Second Population Matters

The concentration of lions has also driven a long-running debate over establishing another free-ranging population. Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh has been proposed as a potential second home for Asiatic lions. The objective is not simply to increase the number of lions but to reduce the species’ dependence on a single geographical stronghold.

A geographically separate population could provide an additional safeguard if disease or another major disturbance affected the Gir landscape. However, the proposal has remained contentious, with questions around habitat suitability, prey availability, management and the transfer of lions from Gujarat. The debate reflects a wider conservation challenge: a species can have a growing population while remaining vulnerable because most of its individuals occupy the same landscape.

More Lions Also Mean a Greater Coexistence Challenge

Population recovery brings another issue into focus: human–wildlife coexistence. As lion numbers increase and animals disperse, they can move through agricultural and other human-dominated landscapes around the protected forests. This creates opportunities for wider habitat use but can also increase interactions with people and livestock.

For local communities, these encounters can mean livestock losses and safety concerns. Lions themselves face risks from roads, open wells, disease and other human-associated hazards.

This makes communities living around lion habitat an important part of the conservation equation. The long-term survival of the species will depend not only on protected forests but also on whether people and lions can continue to share the wider landscape.

For Sustainable Conservation

The increase from 523 lions in 2015 to 891 in 2025 shows that sustained conservation efforts can reverse a historic decline. But the next phase of conservation needs to ask more than whether the population is growing.

It must examine whether available habitat and prey can support further expansion, whether lions are becoming more geographically distributed, whether disease surveillance can detect outbreaks early and whether human–lion conflicts are increasing as the population grows.

The Asiatic lion’s recovery is therefore both an achievement and a reminder of the work ahead. For a species with a highly concentrated wild population, conservation success cannot be measured by numbers alone. Its real test will be whether the population becomes resilient enough to withstand disease, environmental change and the pressures of sharing its habitat with people.

As the world marks the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem, Mumbai mangroves tell a story of survival, climate resilience, and lessons learned from the devastating 2005 floods. From Thane Creek to the Mithi River, these coastal forests reduce flood risk, store carbon, support marine biodiversity, and sustain millions of livelihoods. Yet despite legal safeguards and restoration efforts, pollution, infrastructure projects, and climate change continue to threaten one of India’s most valuable natural defences.

“This is Avicennia marina,” said Manish Zendeker, pointing to the trees lining the water as he steered his ferry through the narrow channels of the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary. “In total, 17 species are found in Maharashtra. Overall, they are called mangroves, but among them, this is a distinct species. We see this more commonly here in Mumbai. If you go towards Ratnagiri, you will mostly see Sonneratia alba.” He went on, unprompted, into the mechanics of why the species in front of us mattered: “Its presence here is so important because it works to filter the creek water — it purifies it. Its roots go underwater and come back up, which are called pneumatophores, or breathing roots. Those roots have many tiny pores. When the high tide water comes in, their pores open up and absorb whatever pollution or chemicals are in the water. So that is its main benefit — it works to keep the creek water clean.”

What surprised our reporting team wasn’t that a boat driver on Thane Creek knew mangroves mattered — most people who live near them can tell you that much. It was the precision: a species name offered without hesitation, a north-south distinction between what grows here and what grows 300 kilometres south near Ratnagiri, a working theory of how the roots do their job, delivered from memory, between turns of the outboard motor. It was the kind of knowledge that usually lives in a research paper.

Today, 26 July, is the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem, a date the United Nations chose deliberately: it marks the anniversary of the 2005 Mumbai deluge, the day 944 millimetres of rain fell on the city in 24 hours and more than a thousand people died. The date is not a coincidence, and neither is the connection to Mumbai. What happened that day, and what has happened in the two decades since, is one of the clearest real-world demonstrations anywhere of what a mangrove forest is actually worth — and what a city pays when it disappears.

How mumbai mangroves protect the city from floods

By the time the 2005 floods hit, Mumbai had already spent roughly a decade quietly getting rid of its mangroves. Between the early 1990s and 2005, the city lost close to 40% of its mangrove cover — something in the range of 9,000 acres — much of it along the Mithi River, where the swampy, root-tangled land was drained and filled to build what is now the Bandra Kurla Complex, one of the city’s premier commercial districts. The Mithi itself, an 18-kilometre stormwater channel that carries overflow from Powai and Vihar lakes out to the Arabian Sea, had been narrowed, built over, and used for decades as an open drain for sewage and industrial waste.

When the rain came, the river had nowhere to put it. A 2018 hydrological case study of the Mithi River modelled what the mangrove loss actually cost the city in physical terms: intact mangrove forest along the riverbanks reduces flood wave height and cuts the inundation area by roughly 21%, by absorbing and slowing the surge before it reaches built-up land. Without that buffer, the 2005 floodwaters had nowhere to go but into the shops, homes, and railway lines of central Mumbai.

The flood changed the law almost immediately. Later that year, the Bombay High Court banned the destruction of mangroves on government land across Maharashtra and prohibited construction within 50 metres of any mangrove area, and by 2012 the state had set up a dedicated Mangrove Cell to enforce it. The reversal that followed is one of the more striking examples of legal protection actually working at scale: according to Forest Survey of India data, Mumbai’s own mangrove cover grew from 42 square kilometres in 2005 to 66 square kilometres by 2017, a 57% recovery. State-wide, Maharashtra’s mangrove cover more than kept pace, expanding from 186 square kilometres in 2013 to 320 square kilometres by 2019, according to the Mangrove Cell’s own figures.

That recovery is real, but it is not the whole story, and it is not evenly spread. Forest officials themselves have cautioned that a rising area figure can mask falling ecological quality — mangroves can be denser or thinner, healthier or stressed, without that showing up in a simple hectare count. And the growth has come alongside continuing, highly localised battles: mangrove clearance tied to the Navi Mumbai International Airport, the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust’s expansion, and the Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link have repeatedly ended up in court, with activists and the state’s own Mangrove Cell frequently on opposite sides of the same case. Nationally, the trend has also turned again: India lost an estimated 7.43 square kilometres of mangrove cover just since 2021, though that recent decline is concentrated in Gujarat and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands rather than in Mumbai itself. The net picture for the city is a genuine recovery, won directly by an emergency response to a specific disaster, that now has to be actively defended patch by patch rather than assumed to hold on its own.

The comparison that made the point hardest to argue with came from a single village. Nandakumar Pawar, a fisherman in Bhandup, a mangrove-fringed suburb in Mumbai’s north-east, has described being startled that his neighbourhood came through the 2005 deluge largely unscathed while the rest of the city drowned. A more than 800-hectare stretch of mangroves near his village had acted as exactly what mangroves are built to be — a sponge, absorbing the surge rather than passing it on to the houses behind it. Pawar went on to found Shree Ekvira Aai Pratishthan, a fishing-community organisation that today serves as caretaker of some 1,042 hectares of mangrove forest between Mulund and Vikhroli along Thane Creek, working with the state Forest Department on protection and restoration. Pawar, now in his sixties, also serves as president of the Maharashtra Small-Scale Traditional Fish Workers Union — one measure of how directly a single flood turned a fisherman into one of the city’s more persistent mangrove advocates.

Thane Creek: a working case study

The waters our reporting team travelled — Thane Creek, Asia’s largest creek at 26 kilometres long — offer a live, ongoing version of this story rather than a historical one. The northern stretch of the creek was declared a flamingo sanctuary in 2015, protecting 1,690 hectares, of which 896 hectares are mangrove forest and the rest open water and mudflats. The creek has drawn over 30,000 migratory flamingos annually since the early 1990s, and by some counts accounts for close to a fifth of the mangrove species diversity found anywhere in India.

It is also a case study in what happens when mangroves are stressed rather than removed outright. Untreated sewage, industrial effluent, and construction runoff have degraded water quality across large stretches of the creek; one WWF-India assessment found that 58 of 69 marine species once recorded there have disappeared over a 14-year period, largely attributed to rising arsenic levels and falling oxygen content in the water. The sanctuary’s own mangroves have been the subject of repeated pollution complaints, including an industrial pipeline leak flagged by local fishermen in 2022. The lesson embedded in Thane Creek is that mangrove protection on paper — a sanctuary notification, a protected-area boundary — does not by itself guarantee a functioning ecosystem; the water quality and the tree cover have to be defended separately and continuously.

Restoration work has had some success. Community-led projects around Thane Creek and Mahim Bay have restored more than 100 hectares of mangrove cover in recent years, working with local fishing communities to combine habitat recovery with sustainable fishing practices and small-scale eco-tourism — the same boat tours that carried our reporting team through the sanctuary.

What the research says mangroves are worth, everywhere

Mumbai’s experience is a local instance of a pattern researchers have now quantified at a global scale, and the numbers are large enough to change how governments plan coastal defence.

A widely cited 2020 study published in Scientific Reports, led by researchers Pelayo Menéndez and Michael Beck, modelled the flood-protection value of every mangrove forest on Earth at 20-kilometre resolution and found that mangroves currently prevent more than US$65 billion in flood damage every year, and protect over 15 million people from flooding they would otherwise experience. A follow-up analysis, published in the World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations 2024 report, priced the total long-term value of that protection — the present value of a century of avoided flood damage — at US$855 billion globally. The countries that benefit most in absolute terms include China, Vietnam, the United States, Australia, and India; in terms of the sheer number of people protected, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh top the list.

Mangroves do this largely through friction. Their dense, tangled root systems and low canopy break up wave energy and slow storm surge as it moves inland; the State of the World’s Mangroves 2024 assessment estimates that mangrove forests reduce flood depth by 15–20% compared with a coastline that has none.

The carbon case is, if anything, stronger. Mangrove soil is waterlogged and largely oxygen-free, which means the organic matter that collects in it barely decomposes — it simply stays there, sometimes for thousands of years. Researchers estimate mangroves store an average of 394 tonnes of carbon per hectare, split roughly 78% in the soil, 15% in above-ground biomass, and the rest below ground, figures that vary sharply by region: forests in Southeast Asia and the Philippines can exceed 650 tonnes per hectare, while carbon density in parts of the Middle East falls below 100. Even though mangroves cover under 1% of the world’s tropical forest area, one estimate puts their total global carbon stock at around 6.5 billion tonnes — the single largest carbon pool of any blue carbon ecosystem, ahead of seagrass meadows and salt marshes combined in density per hectare, if not in total area.

None of this is guaranteed to last. The global rate of mangrove loss has slowed — from roughly 1% a year in the 1990s to about 0.66% a year between 2010 and 2020, and the FAO’s 2025 Global Forest Resources Assessment even found a net global gain since 2010, reversing decades of decline — but a 2024 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that more than half of the world’s mangrove ecosystem types are still at risk of collapse by 2050 if current pressures continue, a category that includes South India’s mangroves specifically, which the IUCN has already classified as critically endangered. Area recovering is not the same as risk disappearing; it mainly means the fight has shifted from outright clearance to slower, harder-to-see pressures — pollution, aquaculture expansion, and the kind of localised infrastructure disputes already playing out around Mumbai.

Governments have started responding at the scale the research implies is necessary. At COP28 in 2023, the Mangrove Breakthrough initiative set a global target of restoring or protecting 15 million hectares of mangrove forest by 2030, backed by a proposed US$4 billion in financing — an explicit bet that the cost of restoration is small next to the avoided cost of flooding, storm damage, and lost carbon storage that follows when mangroves disappear.

What the boat driver already knew

None of this would have surprised the man steering the boat through Thane Creek. Long before any of these studies were published, people who live beside mangrove forests — fishermen in Bhandup, boat operators on the creek, families along the Mithi’s banks — had already worked out, through direct experience, what the data now confirms with figures: that the trees standing between them and the water were doing something that mattered, long before anyone put a price on it.

Mumbai’s flood risk has not gone away since 2005, even though its mangrove cover has, on paper, come back. Sea levels are rising, monsoon rainfall is becoming more erratic and more intense, and the city’s population and built footprint keep expanding into the same low-lying, once-swampy land that used to absorb the water. The mangroves that have grown back — in Thane Creek, along Mahim Bay, in the restored patches near the Mithi — are doing exactly the job the research describes: quietly absorbing surge, filtering pollutants, and storing carbon. Whether they keep doing it depends less on whether the trees are allowed to grow than on whether anyone keeps watching, largely unnoticed, until the next storm makes their condition impossible to ignore.

Earthworms are among the most critical yet overlooked “soil engineers” of terrestrial ecosystems. Despite their foundational role, the systematic neglect of soil biodiversity in agricultural policy represents a serious strategic blind spot. Across India, an invisible crisis is unfolding as earthworm populations decline sharply in both agricultural and natural landscapes. This is not merely a biodiversity concern—it is a direct threat to the country’s soil capital and long-term food security.

As foundational organisms, earthworms provide the biological infrastructure necessary for ecological balance. Their disappearance reflects a deeper structural failure in land management systems and calls for a closer examination of their biological and ecological functions.

The Foundational Role: How Earthworms Sustain Productivity

In modern agronomy, healthy earthworm populations are a prerequisite for sustainable productivity. These organisms create a living soil architecture that no mechanical intervention can replicate. By processing organic matter, they act as a bridge between decomposing waste and plant-available nutrients, ensuring both chemical fertility and physical stability.

“The decline in earthworm populations reflects a deeper crisis in human–environment interactions,” says Sreelakshmy.M, Assistant Professor, Geography, Nirmala College, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. “From a geographical perspective, this issue is not merely biological but spatial and systemic, rooted in the transformation of land, climate, and soil regimes.”

The intensification of agriculture since the Agricultural Revolution has fundamentally altered soil ecosystems. While synthetic fertilizers and pesticides have boosted yields in the short term, they have imposed significant ecological costs. Earthworms, particularly those inhabiting the topsoil, are directly exposed to these chemical inputs. Their decline signals a broader degradation of soil health, as they are key agents of aeration, nutrient cycling, and organic matter decomposition.

When topsoil biodiversity diminishes, the long-term fertility and structural integrity of agricultural landscapes are compromised.

Equally significant is the rapid transformation of land-use patterns. Urban expansion, infrastructure development, and the spread of impermeable surfaces have led to soil sealing and habitat fragmentation. From a spatial perspective, the conversion of biologically active land into built environments represents a permanent loss of ecological function. Earthworms cannot survive beneath concrete, and with their disappearance, essential soil processes are disrupted.

Core Contributions to Soil Vitality

Earthworms play a central role in maintaining soil health. Their burrowing creates complex underground networks that improve soil structure, enhance aeration, and enable deeper root penetration. These tunnels also stimulate microbial activity, strengthening the soil’s biological ecosystem.

By digesting organic matter, earthworms convert decomposing residues into nutrient-rich castings. These natural fertilizers contain concentrated levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—essential elements for plant growth. Through this continuous recycling process, they sustain the nutrient base of agricultural systems.

In addition, earthworms bind soil particles into stable aggregates, improving water infiltration and moisture retention. This reduces surface runoff, protects against erosion, and enhances resilience to extreme weather conditions.

Together, these processes form the backbone of agricultural stability. Yet, modern human-driven pressures are rapidly eroding this biological foundation.

“Rising global temperatures increase soil heat and accelerate moisture evaporation,” Sreelakshmi explains. “Earthworms depend on a delicate balance of temperature and moisture. When soils dry or overheat, survival becomes difficult, often leading to localized mass mortality.”

This decline illustrates the interconnected nature of environmental stressors—chemical intensification, land-use change, and climate shifts—operating simultaneously across scales.

Analyzing the Drivers of Decline: A Multi-Front Threat

The shift from traditional Indian farming—once characterised by organic inputs, mixed cropping, and minimal disturbance—to intensive industrial agriculture has created increasingly hostile conditions for soil life. The decline of earthworms is driven by multiple, overlapping pressures:

Chemical Toxicity: The extensive use of urea-based fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides introduces toxic compounds into the soil. Many of these act as neurotoxins, impairing earthworms’ nervous systems and reducing their reproductive capacity.

Nutritional Depletion: Practices such as stubble burning and the removal of crop residues deprive soil organisms of organic matter, their primary food source.

Mechanical Disturbance: Frequent tillage and heavy machinery disrupt soil structure, destroy burrow networks, and cause compaction, limiting oxygen availability.

Habitat Erosion: Deforestation and poor land management accelerate topsoil loss, eliminating the primary habitat where earthworms thrive.

Climate Stress: Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts, and flooding create unstable and often lethal conditions for moisture-sensitive organisms.

According to Dr. C P Maruthamalai, Assistant Professor, Geology,
Madurai Kamaraj University, the intensive use of chemical inputs significantly disrupts soil ecosystems. Excess nitrogen alters soil chemistry, creating conditions hostile to beneficial organisms. Prolonged exposure reduces earthworm mobility, feeding ability, and reproduction, gradually weakening entire populations.

These stressors are no longer isolated—they form a systemic crisis that is reshaping agricultural landscapes.

The Domino Effect: Systemic Consequences of Decline

The disappearance of earthworms triggers a cascading “domino effect” across ecological and economic systems, transforming agriculture from a self-sustaining biological model into a fragile, input-dependent system.

Declining Natural Fertility: Reduced decomposition slows nutrient cycling, forcing farmers to rely increasingly on synthetic fertilizers, often leading to rising input costs.

Weakened Soil Structure: Compacted soil restricts root growth and reduces water efficiency, making crops more vulnerable to stress.

Water Instability: Lower infiltration rates increase runoff, contributing to both drought conditions and soil erosion.

Food Security Risks: As soil productivity declines, crop yields become less stable, threatening long-term food systems.

Biodiversity Collapse: Earthworms are central to the soil food web; their disappearance disrupts microorganisms and higher organisms alike, leading to broader ecological breakdown.

This systemic decline underscores the fragility of current agricultural practices.

Rebuilding Soil Health

Addressing this crisis requires a fundamental shift in agricultural thinking—from short-term chemical dependency to long-term ecological restoration. Earthworms must be recognised as key indicators of soil health.

Strategic priorities include:

1. Transitioning to organic and natural farming systems

2. Restoring soil organic matter through compost, green manure, and vermicompost

3. Adopting conservation agriculture and reducing tillage

4. Eliminating stubble burning and promoting residue retention

5. Integrating soil biodiversity into agricultural policy and extension services

Such measures are essential not only for restoring earthworm populations but also for rebuilding resilient farming systems.

An Imperative for the Future

The decline of earthworms is a warning signal of a deeper ecological imbalance within India’s landscapes. Protecting these silent engineers is not simply an environmental concern—it is central to economic stability, agricultural sustainability, and national food security.

A resilient future depends on restoring the biological life of our soils.

Because the future of farming does not begin in laboratories or markets—it begins beneath our feet.