CI, which is also working with local partners and communities, hopes the credits will cover half of the project’s $600,000 (£440,000) operating costs. The money from selling blue carbon credits will go directly to communities to fund the Cispatá mangrove restoration. Some 50% of mangroves have been lost from the Caribbean coast over the past three decades, due to cattle ranching, roads and tourism.” María Claudia Diazgranados, a marine biologist and CI’s blue carbon director in Colombia, said: “We have been looking for a way to fund this ecosystem for years. For example, Verra, a non-profit organisation based in the US that administers the world’s leading carbon-credit standard, estimates that the carbon emissions mitigated by Cispatá to be almost 1m tonnes over three decades – the equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from the annual mileage of 214,000 cars. Some conservation groups are selling carbon credits to fund their work. These ecosystems are some of the most threatened in the world by coastal development – damaged by farming, harmful fishing practices and pollution – so protecting and restoring them is expensive.Įnter the carbon-offset market. Protecting and restoring seagrass, mangrove and salt marsh ecosystems – which account for more than 50% of all carbon storage in ocean sediments – could help absorb the equivalent of as much as 1.4bn tons of emissions a year by 2050, it says. And the “big three” stores of blue carbon – mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass – are suddenly urgent new areas of conservation.Īs much as a fifth of the emissions cuts we need to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C will need to come from the ocean, according to the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. This superpower means “blue carbon” (the sequestration and storage of carbon by ocean ecosystems) is gaining attention in the race towards net zero. Locator map for Cispatá conservation project
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says blue carbon ecosystems can be included in official national accounting and mitigation commitments under the Paris climate agreement, but many countries – including the UK – have not yet done so.They are also among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet, however, and disturbing them could release vast greenhouse gas emissions.Seagrass is one of the world's most effective carbon sinks – it can bury carbon 35 times faster than tropical rainforests and, if undisturbed, can store it for millennia, where rainforests hold it for decades.These ecosystems are carbon storage powerhouses, storing up to 10 times as much carbon as forests.Seaweed aquaculture is another way to store carbon. They suck carbon dioxide from the air via photosynthesis and store it in biomass and sediment. Mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass are the “big three” – the best studied and understood blue carbon ecosystems.Blue carbon is the CO2 sequestered and stored in coastal and marine ecosystems.
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