indonesia is an archipelagic country with more than 17,000 islands and 95,181 km of coastline, of which about 6,000 islands are inhabited by over 238 million people. in the 1980s, there are more than 4.2 million hectares of mangroves but half of that coverage has been lost by the end of the 1990s. for centuries, the indonesian people have relied on the resources provided by the mangroves, for firewood, charcoal, tannin, dyes, food and beverages, medicine, pole and timber. in the early days of commercialization, fishing and charcoal production made the basic economic activities. now, millions of hectares of mangrove forests are lost to agriculture, oil palm plantations and fish farms, making coastal communities vulnerable to the force of tropical storms and loss of livelihood and products.