Abu Dhabi’s Mangroves: The National Park Inside the Capital

There is a national park inside Abu Dhabi city. Not on its edge, not an hour down the highway —
inside it, off the Eastern Ring Road, close enough to Reem Island that you can see towers through the
trees. It is free, it is open around the clock, and most residents have never been.

The Abu Dhabi mangroves are also the subject of the emirate’s most successful
environmental programme and its most uncomfortable environmental finding, and those two things are
happening simultaneously.

One species, everywhere

Everything you will see is the same tree. The Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi is unambiguous: UAE
mangrove forests “are composed of a single mangrove species, the Grey Mangrove (Avicennia marina).”
A second species, Rhizophora mucronata, seems to have disappeared in historical times, and although
there has been work to reintroduce it, Avicennia marina remains the only mangrove that occurs naturally
in the country.

Locally it is called qurm — or gurm, depending which agency page you read. Mature trees average
around five metres tall with a trunk circumference up to 40 cm. The genus name comes from Avicenna, the
eleventh-century physician and philosopher Ibn Sina.

How much there is, and why nobody agrees

You will find the mangrove area given as 70, 76, 141, 176, 183 and 201 square kilometres. All six
come from real government sources. They differ by year, by whether the figure covers Abu Dhabi or the
whole UAE, and by whether planted areas count alongside natural ones.

The current figure, from EAD’s own restoration guidelines: “As of 2024, 201 km2 of mangroves
have been mapped across the UAE of which 176 km2 are in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, with this extent
including both planted and natural mangroves.”

So: about 176 km² in Abu Dhabi as of 2024, natural and planted together. Never quote a mangrove area
without the year and the scope attached — it is the single easiest way to be wrong about this subject.

The finding nobody reports

Here is the part that does not appear in the press releases.

EAD’s guidelines state that “mangroves in Abu Dhabi Emirate have been classified as Endangered
by the Abu Dhabi Red list of Ecosystems (2022), despite having an increase in extent” — because
of “evidence of threatening processes such as coastal development likely to cause declines in natural
mangrove ecosystems within the next 20 years.”

Read that carefully. The total area is growing, and the ecosystem is classified as endangered anyway.
EAD’s own charting of mangrove extent shows the mechanism: a loss of natural mangroves in the emirate
alongside an increase in planted areas, producing an overall rise in the headline number.

Planting is not the same as preserving. A newly seeded stand and a century-old natural forest are not
interchangeable, and the emirate’s own scientists have said so — which is more than most conservation
programmes are willing to publish about themselves.

What has actually been planted

Two initiatives get conflated constantly, and they are different things.

The federal target is 100 million mangroves by 2030. It was announced by the Minister
of Climate Change and Environment at COP26 in Glasgow on 9 November 2021, raising the UAE’s Nationally
Determined Contribution target from 30 million. At the time the ministry put the UAE’s baseline at 60
million mangroves spanning 183 km², capturing 43,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

The Abu Dhabi Mangrove Initiative is separate. It was launched in February 2022 by
H.H. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, alongside Prince William,
as a platform for coastal ecosystem and nature-based solutions projects across the emirate.

By December 2023, EAD with the Department of Municipalities and Transport and ADNOC had planted 44
million mangroves, 23 million of them in the preceding two years across some 9,200 hectares.

The most recent accounting came on 25 July 2026, with the launch of the Mangrove
Observatory — a digital platform consolidating 19 active projects across more than 1,775
hectares of restored habitat. It tracks more than 18.5 million mangroves planted, a recorded growth count
exceeding 10.4 million, and an average restoration success rate of 46.94%.

That last figure is the honest one, and it is roughly half.

Drones are the least effective method

Drone seeding gets the coverage. EAD planted a million mangrove seeds by drone in a phase announced in
January 2023, following a 2022 trial with ENGIE and Distant Imagery at Mirfa Lagoon.

But EAD’s own comparison of methods, based on monitoring across sites in the emirate, ranks them:

The most photogenic technique is the least effective of the three. EAD’s guidelines also advise
small-scale trials “not exceeding 10 hectares” before any large-scale project — restraint that rarely
makes the announcement.

The carbon case

Mangroves are the reason blue carbon is discussed in Abu Dhabi at all. EAD calculates the emirate’s
blue carbon ecosystems store more than an estimated 41 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in soil and
biomass.

For mangroves specifically, as of April 2024: 2,441,600 tonnes of carbon stored by natural mangroves
and 676,480 tonnes by planted trees — more than three million tonnes in total. EAD puts the storage rate
at 0.5 tonnes per hectare per year.

Note the ratio. Natural mangroves hold roughly four times the carbon of the planted ones, which is the
Red List finding restated in tonnes.

Where to go

Mangrove National Park sits on the Eastern Ring Road, holds more than 19 km² of
forest, and is protected by law. EAD’s own visitor page says it is open 24 hours a day, seven days a
week, and is “totally free to look at” — though private operators charge for excursions, with a two-hour
kayak tour at approximately AED 160. Licensed operators named by the tourism authority include Seahawk
Water Sports, Noukhada and Al Mahara Diving. More than 60 bird species use it, including greater
flamingos and western reef herons.

Jubail Mangrove Park, on Jubail Island between Yas and Saadiyat, is the built
alternative: a boardwalk of about two kilometres with three trails, open 7am to 10pm daily, operated by
Jubail Island Investment Company. The boardwalk ticket runs AED 10–20 and kayaking from around AED 80 to
AED 150 depending on the tour. In October 2023 EAD and JIIC signed an agreement to establish a Jubail
Mangrove Innovation Centre there, with a nursery, visitor centre and offices, EAD providing scientific
supervision and JIIC building and hosting it.

Further out, Bul Syayeef Marine Protected Area covers 145 km² west of Musaffah
Industrial Area. Established in 2017, it holds mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass beds and intertidal
mudflats, supports more than 80 migratory and resident bird species, and hosts one of the largest greater
flamingo breeding colonies in the Arabian Gulf. It is one of the UAE’s ten Wetlands of International
Importance.

Mangrove Marine National Park is one of six marine protected areas in EAD’s Sheikh Zayed Protected
Areas Network, alongside Al Saadiyat Marine National Park, Al Yasat, Marawah Marine Biosphere Reserve,
Bul Syayeef and Ras Ghanada. Mangroves have been protected under federal laws 23 and 24 of 1999.

A hundred years of practice

EAD makes a claim about the emirate that is easy to miss: Abu Dhabi has “the oldest known mangrove
restoration and afforestation initiatives anywhere in the world”, with some stands nearly a century old.

That reframes the whole programme. This is not a climate-era initiative bolted onto a petrostate. It
is a very long-running habit that the climate era has given a new vocabulary and a much larger budget —
the same instinct visible at
Masdar City and in the
oases our guide to Al Ain
describes.

The Red List classification is the honest counterweight. Planting 18.5 million trees is a genuine
achievement. So is admitting that coastal development may still cost the emirate its natural mangroves
within twenty years, and that both things are true at once.

For more of the capital worth seeing, our guides to the
Saadiyat Cultural
District, the
Sheikh Zayed Grand
Mosque and
Zayed International
Airport cover the rest of a visit.

Primary sources: the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi’s
Mangrove
Restoration Guidelines, its
mangroves
species page, its
Mangrove
National Park visitor page, its
Sheikh
Zayed Protected Areas Network and its
mangrove
ecosystems briefing; the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment on the
100-million
target; the Abu Dhabi Media Office on the
Mangrove
Observatory and
Ghars
Al Emarat;
Jubail
Mangrove Park; the Department of Culture and Tourism on
Mangrove
National Park; and the UAE Government portal on
the
country’s wetlands. Prices checked 20 August 2026.