Seascape carbon management beyond wetlands as eligible blue carbon activities

Management of blue carbon ecosystems has become an area of extreme interest in the context of providing nature-based solutions, or nature-inclusive designs for environmental management, that may help to deliver climate change mitigation. Carbon market methodologies for such defined management activities outline procedures that projects must follow to deliver GHG emission reductions or removals that are real, measurable, additional, permanent (>100 years), independently verified, and conservatively estimated. These methodologies must be rooted in scientific understanding of the global carbon cycle so that projects can develop high quality and credible carbon offsets for the carbon markets. Such carbon projects are coming online for tidal wetlands, particularly mangroves. A lack of scientific consensus and in many cases data gaps, amongst other challenges, have prevented the inclusion of other marine ecosystems under carbon market mechanisms thus far. This has limited the ability to harness private finance to further support the growth of ocean carbon conservation. In recent years, science has advanced at pace.

This report reviews current scientific evidence on oceanic carbon cycling and storage to assess the potential of managing other ecosystem types toward climate mitigation.