This paper, based on my PhD fieldwork, will focus on how coastal communities living with/among mangroves in Tanzania (the Rufiji Delta and Mafia Island) are expressing, imagining, perceiving, and defining urgency regarding climate change, amidst external forces and their own contrary or similar discourses. Many ethnographic studies have been “more comfortable conducting studies of the local observation of climate impacts than the local reception of climate science” (Rudiak-Gould 2011: 267). This paper is working to address this gap through an attentiveness to the after-effects of climate change ideologies, projects and policies in coastal communities in Tanzania. This presentation will provide ethnographic context for how people in the Rufiji Delta and Mafia Island are navigating climate change, climate change policies and projects implemented by the UNDP and the WWF, and what types of cultural assertions are emanating from these spaces. Both the Rufiji Delta and Mafia Island have hosted UNDP and WWF development and environmental projects that are promoting the planting and conservation of mangrove forests. This planting is often concomitant with the rhetoric of mangroves being a technical/biological fix for increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere. It remains to be seen how people living in these environments are understanding and considering these projects and their related science/rhetoric after their initial applications. Additionally, a host of local Tanzanian organisations have begun to lead mangrove conservation projects, and this paper looks at local expressions of environmental agency and awareness that are a part of these initiatives. This paper leans on larger structural perspectives that consider systemic influences on what are considered to be “unsustainable” practices, and investigates the locally understood validity of such claims.