The finalisation of the Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP) for Kerala is once again caught in technical issues with the Technical Scrutiny Committee (TSC) of the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change asking the State authorities to look into the public complaints regarding the demarcation of mangroves.
Mangrove areas come under the Coastal Regulation Zone where development activities are not permitted. The committee had asked the Kerala Coastal Zone Management Authority (KCZMA), the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) and the National Centre for Earth Science Studies (NCESS) to look into the 375 complaints that mangroves were wrongly marked in coastal districts. The committee sought to know the actual status of the mangrove vegetations in the holdings and to assess whether any other vegetation has been misinterpreted as mangroves. The committee also wanted to ascertain whether mangroves were destroyed on the holdings, sources said.
The Ministry will notify the CZMP only when it is recommended by the TSC. Kerala needs to get its CZMP notified for its 10 coastal districts to get the benefits prescribed in the CRZ 2019 rules, which is a relaxed version of the earlier notifications.
The field verification and the other assessments revealed that the demarcation of mangroves was done correctly in all the 375 cases and no modification of the draft CZMP was required.
Report submitted
Field verifications were carried out in 14 mangrove locations during the last week of May. In case of the other 361 complaints, the mangrove areas were verified using the existing database available with the NCSCM, NCESS and KCZMA. Google images of 2011 and 2024 were also used to understand the changes that took place in the mangrove areas. The report was submitted to the TCS for approval, sources said.