Blue Carbon as NbS

1 - Fund further research to reduce uncertainties about the amount of carbon removed and stored by Blue Carbon ecosystems. This is essential to maintain reliable, science based crediting and offsetting systems. It requires guidelines on how to measure the various processes involving the import and export of carbon, uptake and release of greenhouse gases, and socio-economic factors that all occur at local scale. This also needs to be placed in the context of climate change, as rising temperature, sea level, and changes in precipitation may impact the plant and microbial diversity in Blue Carbon ecosystems, directly affecting the balance between carbon uptake and storage, and carbon release. 2 - Coastal habitat conservation and restoration projects that measure carbon fluxes are important to enable the inclusion of coastal blue carbon ecosystems into national greenhouse gas inventories, however more research is needed. 3 - The role and dynamics of non-carbon GHGs, like methane and nitrous oxide, in blue carbon ecosystems need further clarification. Because the climate-warming potential of methane is many times stronger than CO2, methane needs to be widely studied across blue carbon ecosystems to clarify which human activities and environmental changes can increase its release into the atmosphere.(...) It is also important to understand the influence of ocean acidification versus the input of carbonates and other inorganic components on plant growth because potential of hydrogen (pH) plays an important role in the balance of greenhouse gases being emitted or sequestered. 4 - Methodologies for estimating blue carbon are far behind those for estimating in land forest-based carbon, so investment in mangrove forests for their carbon sequestration value is lagging.