Name: Blue carbon can change the fight against climate change
Uploaded: 2021-12-14
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Mangroves grow much faster than terrestrial forests and can sequester 10 times as much carbon.

Mangroves grow much faster than terrestrial forests and can sequester 10 times as much carbon.

Blue carbon can change the fight against climate change

Environment

Blue carbon is used to refer to Harbin that's related to the ocean and ocean ecosystems. Generally, when we talk about blue carbon, we are talking about tidal wetlands, including mangroves, seagrass meadows and salt marsh, and specifically looking at restoration or conservation of ecosystems that are at threat of being integrated or converted. Mhm compared to all ecosystem types, they represent a pretty small land area compared to like terrestrial forests or grasslands or agricultural land. But they do store a really high amount of carbon for the small area of land that they cover globally. So despite a babe is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in the municipality of San Antero, Which is really a town of about 30,000 people it's very small, relatively low income. A lot of people there work in fishing agriculture. A lot of people work in the mangroves themselves. In collaboration with conservationists and nonprofit organizations in the region, Conservation International is supporting a project called Viva Mandela. What we are doing in Colombia is ensuring that mangrove forest are maintained, their in order to guarantee that the carbon that those ecosystems are the question is a conserved in that region, the project in a spot to Colombia, is actually the first project that used one of the relatively new blue carbon methodologies, and it's the first one that applies to conservation of tidal wetland ecosystems. Sparta is the first project in the world to have the carbon stored in the trees. The roots, the trunk believes, so it'll fully calculated and given a price on the international market. So far, they've sold 20,000 off that and that money. Eventually, most of it will go into the hands of the community, and part of it has to go to offset the cost of the monitoring and evaluation. By valuing that carbon, you can make sure that you will receive financial revenue to maintain the activities that are needed to conserve the forest in a long term. It surprised me just how integrated it is in the community for being such a groundbreaking project funded by Apple and these international organizations. The Mongol ero, which the mangrove workers will go into the canoes and grow into the mangrove and we'll see certain trees will be marked with spray paint, and those three are marked because the roots are tangled and that prevents the open flow of water into the mangrove and can increase the salinity, which damages the trees. And it's they're less like that. They'll die off. They'll stop capturing carbon so they go in. They hack at the tangled roots to open up the flow of water and make sure that the mangroves stay healthy. I think the conversation around carbon offsetting and using carbon credits has really been growing a lot within the past few years, and especially for what's called nature based solutions. So basically any climate solution that involves a natural ecosystem, the blue carbon ecosystems store the carbon in the sediment, and that is different from the terrestrial forests. That's why blue carbon ecosystems are so important for climate change Mitigation. Mangroves and Wetlands often grow much faster than terrestrial forests and can sequester 10 times as much carbon. They also provide a buffer and storms and flooding and coastal erosion. They provide a habitat for the wildlife that lives there, and they're also the source of employment for the community. Those communities that are part of the project are very poor. We are working with more or less 4000 people in a between into different villages and all of them are considered as one of the poorest communities in the entire Caribbean coast. It will be really important to protect these ecosystems from different threats, that they face things like coastal development, cutting down mangrove to build new hotels or tourism attractions and also things like sea level rise, um, and other changes in the environment that are also related to climate change. So it's potentially really important to helping solve the climate crisis. But there are also a threat because of impacts from climate change. I think, as we kind of move forward with trying to address the climate crisis. One of the most important ways to do that will be by increasing carbon sequestration and um, kind of greenhouse gas emissions removal, actually taking it out of the atmosphere. Tidal wetland ecosystems are always continuing to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and then many of the kind of newer blue carbon solutions like CB farming or help, are also potentially really powerful in doing that. Mhm, mhm, mhm. Yeah,