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Resources sat down with RFF Associate Research Director and Fellow Juha Siikamäki to discuss his recent work on how protecting coastal mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grass meadows may prevent billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the air. In an excerpt from that interview, he emphasizes the importance of incorporating blue carbon into climate policy and describes the conservation challenges ahead.
Resources: What exactly is blue carbon, and why is it important?
Juha Siikamäki: “Blue carbon” refers to carbon that is stored by coastal and ocean environments. Recently, the main focus of the conservation community has been on three different kinds of blue carbon ecosystems: mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grasses. These areas are generally known as carbon sinks. We know that these areas preserve a considerable amount of carbon, but the storage capacity is under threat due to development.
Their storage capacity is especially significant relevant to their total area. It turns out that the total area—for instance, of mangroves—is relatively small. It’s only about 1 percent of the total area of tropical forests. But on a per-acre basis, the amount of carbon stored in mangroves is multiple times the amount of carbon stored in tropical forests.
Resources: How did you decide to focus on blue carbon storage?
Siikamäki: For a long time now, we’ve known that natural systems provide a significant storage capacity for carbon. Recently, there’s been a great deal of discussion and research on tropical forests, focusing on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).
It turns out that, according to most estimates, we can avoid emissions at a relatively low cost by preventing deforestation. It’s less costly to avoid emissions from tropical deforestation than, for example, reducing emissions from an industrial source with fossil fuel combustion. It seems like a win–win strategy.
We’ve also known that coastal areas are extremely valuable for many reasons. They provide ecological functions; they’re important for fisheries; they’re important for water quality, storm protection, recreation, and so on. We’ve also known that they contain a considerable amount of carbon, but we haven’t known exactly how much.
The big challenge with coastal conservation is that coastal areas have become especially attractive for development. Coastal areas have been converted for many purposes: agricultural development, tourism, residential development, industrial development, and even fisheries development. And coastal development can create very high returns. The idea is that maybe blue carbon will help strengthen the case for coastal preservation.
Missing from this debate was any information on the economic potential of avoiding carbon emissions by protecting coastal environments. Exactly how much carbon do these areas store? How much is the carbon worth? How costly would it be to preserve these areas? Our goal when we started this research was to find out to what extent, from an economic perspective, there might be justification for preservation of coastal areas.
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