Blue Carbon
What is Blue Carbon?
Blue carbon is the term for carbon contained by the world's ocean and coastal ecosystems. Seagrasses, mangroves, and salt marshes capture and hold carbon. Mangroves are environments considered for blue carbon storage, and they are confined to the tropical and subtropical areas. Seagrass meadows may proliferate from cold polar to tropical waters. The total area of mangroves, coastal marshes and seagrass meadows all over the world are small with respect to the area used for agriculture or forests, but the carbon stored in these ecosystems are much more abundant. Damage to these ecosystems deal an enormous amount of carbon emitted back into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Protecting and restoring these habitats is a good way to mitigate climate change. When these coastal systems are protected, these also provide many other benefits to people for tourism, storm protection, and nursery habitat for commercial and recreational fisheries.
Fate of carbon dioxide (CO2) in a blue carbon ecosystem (left to right: mangroves, tidal salt marshes, and seagrasses) taken from the Blue Carbon Primer for the Coral Triangle Region (BlueCARES).
Some of these highly productive marine ecosystems are located in the Coral Triangle, where Philippine and Indonesian coral reefs, seagrass meadows and mangrove forests thrive. The unparalleled diversity of these ecosystems have long been known and has been a source of tourism activities. Much less known are the implications of carbon fluxes that are sequestered into these environments and exported to the larger ocean, as well as the transformations and molecular composition of the organic matter. In today’s warming world, capture of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, is an economy by itself. Mechanisms to decrease the CO2 via natural or engineered processes are utilized and sold off collectively in billions of dollars in a race to comply with pledges to reduce carbon emissions. Perhaps a more desperate humanitarian plea is to keep the temperature rise to 1.5°C, which echoed through the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.