[OANNES Foro] Coastal wetlands can have a crucial role in the fight against climate change.

[Mario Cabrejos]

Coastal wetlands can have a crucial role in the fight against climate
change.

Blue future

19 January 2016

http://www.nature.com/news/blue-future-1.19191?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160121
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Over the past decade, scientists and policymakers have joined efforts to
create a science-based framework under the auspices of the United Nations to
protect our remaining tropical forests. These carbon-rich ecosystems help to
moderate the climate and serve as a treasure trove of biodiversity and a
resource for local and indigenous peoples. Governments across the tropics
have begun to incorporate forest conservation into their climate and
development plans. Now it is time to do the same with coastal wetlands.

Roughly half of the world’s carbon emissions are absorbed by the oceans, and
the UN estimates that at least half of that carbon sequestration takes place
in ‘blue-carbon’ wetlands. Often occupied by seagrass and mangroves, these
saltwater ecosystems promote healthy fisheries and sequester carbon in their
soils. Mangroves also stave off erosion and serve as the first line of
defence against powerful storms as well as saltwater intrusion into local
groundwater resources. The world has lost more than one-third of its
mangroves over the past several decades, and more succumb each year to
shrimp farms, rice paddies and palm plantations, as well as to tourism and
real-estate development. There’s money to be made, but it’s the environment
that pays.

Nascent efforts are under way to halt this degradation, and a few pioneering
projects have  <http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110518/full/473255a.html>
already shown success. Senegal is home to the world’s largest mangrove
restoration project, which began in 2008. Villagers have planted around 79
million mangrove trees across more than 7,900 hectares. The project has been
registered and certified under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM), and is benefiting from the sale of carbon credits.

In 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme launched the Blue Carbon
Initiative, which seeks to reverse current trends and increase the area of
coastal wetlands under effective management by 2025. The
<http://www.nature.com/news/parisclimate-1.17532> global climate agreement
signed in Paris last December opens the door to advance such efforts, for
example by enabling carbon trading and a programme similar to the CDM that
allows countries and companies to pay to reduce emissions or build carbon
stocks in projects such as the one in Senegal. It will be up to governments
to incorporate coastal management into their climate plans, and to begin
creating what some have called the ‘blue-green economy’.

The available evidence justifies the pursuit of these efforts. Mangrove
ecosystems alone could store as much as 20 billion tonnes of carbon —
equivalent to more than 2 years of global carbon emissions — in their soils,
much of which would be released into the atmosphere if the trees were
destroyed. A 2012 study suggested that mangrove conservation could be
effective at a cost of just US$4–10 per tonne of carbon dioxide, which is
within the current range of prices on the European carbon trading system (
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200519109> J. Siikamäki et al. Proc. Natl
Acad. Sci. USA 109, 14369–14374; 2012).

In some cases, mangrove protection and restoration could even benefit from
the existing forest-carbon-trading framework, which enables developed
countries to invest in efforts to reduce deforestation in the developing
world. But more science is needed, both to document the extent and causes of
the problem and to provide the data that will be needed if countries are to
incorporate coastal wetlands into their carbon inventories and climate
planning. We know too little about what happens to the carbon locked up in
plants and soils when they are converted for other uses.

Just as occurred with remedying tropical deforestation, science and policy
can move forward in parallel. As countries establish coastal management
policies, they will help to drive the development of both science and
policies. One opportunity is in the Dominican Republic, which has devised a
comprehensive plan to reduce emissions by conserving and restoring mangrove
forests. That project is registered with the UN, and it incorporates
scientific objectives, including quantification of the carbon sequestration
and storage capacity of these ecosystems. This will inform the policy
framework and provide the scientific basis for any economic returns that the
initiative may reap years and decades into the future.

Meeting the objectives of the Paris agreement — to contain global warming
over the course of the twenty-first century — will require urgent action on
all fronts. Countries must work to reduce industrial carbon emissions, but
ensuring that natural ecosystems continue to function is equally vital — and
relatively simple. The planet that humanity calls home already knows how to
sequester carbon. Let’s make our forests and coastal wetlands work for us.

 



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