Blue Carbon: an effective climate mitigation and drawdown tool?

Blue carbon is increasingly being championed by organisations and governments as a tool for climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as addressing multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

What is blue carbon, how much potential does it actually have, and how could we use it? 

The term "blue carbon" encompasses vegetated coastal ecosystems of seagrasses, tidal marshes and mangroves, which are highly efficient at carbon drawdown or biosequestration - capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) using biological processes - and which store huge amounts of carbon in their plants and soils (Macreadie et al. 2017a). They may have a very large potential for further storing carbon, and are also are significant biodiversity hotspots.

Terrestrial ecosystems have attracted much attention for their capacity to mitigate climate change as a carbon store (or “sink”) for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, but water-based ecosystems have received comparatively little attention until recently.

Read the Climate Code Red story by Alia Armistead - “Blue Carbon: an effective climate mitigation and drawdown tool?”