Editor’s note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet and their solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to promote awareness and education on key sustainability issues and inspire positive action.
For years, Gaurav Patil has witnessed fishing nets left unattended in India’s mangrove forests get caught and entangled. They are known as “ghost nets” and can break down into microplastics, choking coastal trees and destroying ecosystems.
Hoping to shed light on this “overlooked” crisis, he took his camera to the tidal shores of Nandgaon village in Maharashtra, south of Mumbai, and captured images of trees at night with 13-second ultraviolet exposures, giving the nets caught in their canopies an eerie glow. The resulting image will be the overall winner of the 2026 Mangrove Photography Award.
“I came across this particular location where discarded fishing nets were trapped,” the marine biologist-turned-photographer explained in the photo he posted. “It’s not a rare sight, but most of us overlook it and the problem remains unanswered. (So) we wanted to document it in an artistic way to capture the viewer’s attention.”
Titled “Tangled Shine: When Life Meets Ruin,” this fascinating photograph spotlights a crisis that has been quietly unfolding for years.
India has nearly 5,000 square kilometers (1,931 square miles) of mangrove forests spread across its coastline, including 40 percent of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, with the remainder in neighboring Bangladesh. These trees are critical coastal barriers that protect endangered species, prevent coastline erosion, store up to four times more carbon per acre of rainforest, and sustain the livelihoods of millions of people through fishing and tourism. However, this valuable ecosystem faces increasing threats.
In addition to the “ghost nets,” rising sea levels, aquaculture such as shrimp farms, and coastal development are also causing damage. In December 2025, the Bombay High Court approved a road construction project that could affect more than 45,000 mangrove trees along Mumbai’s west coast. But preserving these forests could be part of the solution to urban flooding.
“Mangroves are increasingly at risk around the world, and Gaurav Patil has managed to capture an urgent threat that resonates around the world and has been kept under the radar,” Leo Thom, creative director and founder of the Mangrove Photography Award, told CNN. “Abandoned fishing gear is silent and destructive, slowly suffocating plants and releasing microplastics into ecosystems that persist for decades.”
This problem extends far beyond India. WWF estimates that between 500,000 and 1 million tonnes of fishing gear is thrown into the ocean every year. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems assessment found that more than half of the world’s mangrove forests are at risk of collapse by 2050.
The diversity at stake is vast, and other winning images at the award show wild animals taking refuge in mangroves around the world, from jungle cats and Royal Bengal tigers in India to bottlenose dolphins in the United States and Nile monitor lizards in Gambia, West Africa.
“Storytelling is a hugely important part of protecting these ecosystems, and we hope this award will contribute to raising awareness about how to properly restore habitats,” Tom added. “Money is just being funneled into large-scale afforestation projects that are not successful,” he continued, adding that research into hydrology, or rebuilding the natural flow of water into degraded mangrove ecosystems, has proven beneficial “because it allows mangroves to spread naturally without human intervention.”
One of the award categories is dedicated to conservation and restoration. The winning image, taken by Garry Rotrun, shows Pasilla, 56, from Bedno, Central Java, Indonesia, planting mangrove saplings after another flood submerged his village. In 2021, she and her son planted 15,000 seedlings in one day. The next morning the waves washed them all away.
“It’s exactly these kinds of stories that help us spread awareness,” Tom said. “When we started, we received fewer than 100 entries. This year, our 12th year, we received more than 5,000 entries. This shows that more and more people are recognizing how important mangroves are for climate resilience and coastal protection.”
