Blue Carbon: Challenges and opportunities to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises

Recommendations

• Fund further research to reduce uncertainties about the amount of carbon removed and stored by Blue Carbon ecosystems.
   
• Fund the development of more tailored monitoring and continuous observations of carbon stocks, fluxes, and process rates across various time and space scales to improve our understanding of the global Ocean carbon budget, the biological carbon pumps (BCP, CCP) and sedimentary carbon storage.
   
• Support sustained observations to better parameterise processes (e.g. remineralisation, fragmentation, sinking) in carbon cycle models.
   
• Fund research to quantify the possible production of methane and nitrous oxide that might arise from coastal restoration efforts over the long term, and the impact that this might have on greenhouse gas emissions.
   
• Fund research to understand the dynamics of offshore carbon stocks and sequestration, and the possible impact of human activities, such as trawl fishing and deep sea mining.
   
• Promote collaboration between environmental scientists, social scientists and engineers to ensure the integration of Blue Carbon solutions