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Review
. 2024 May 17:2:e9.
doi: 10.1017/cft.2024.9. eCollection 2024.

Restoring blue carbon ecosystems

Daniel A Friess  1 , Zoë I Shribman  1 , Milica Stankovic  2 , Naima Iram  3 , Melissa M Baustian  4 , Carolyn J Ewers Lewis  5
Affiliations
Review

Restoring blue carbon ecosystems

Daniel A Friess et al. Camb Prism Coast Futur. .

Abstract

Mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrasses have experienced extensive historical reduction in extent due to direct and indirect effects of anthropogenic land use change. Habitat loss has contributed carbon emissions and led to foregone opportunities for carbon sequestration, which are disproportionately large due to high 'blue carbon' stocks and sequestration rates in these coastal ecosystems. As such, there has been a rapid increase in interest in using coastal habitat restoration as a climate change mitigation tool. This review shows that restoration efforts are able to substantially increase blue carbon stocks, while also having a positive impact on various gaseous fluxes. However, blue carbon increases are spatially variable, due to biophysical factors such as climate and geomorphic setting. While there are potentially hundreds of thousands of hectares of land that may be biophysically suitable for restoration, these activities are still often conducted at small scales and with mixed success. Maximizing potential carbon gains through blue carbon restoration will require managers and coastal planners to overcome the myriad socioeconomic and governance constraints related to land tenure, legislation, target setting and cost, which often push restoration projects into locations that are biophysically unsuitable for plant colonization.

Keywords: mangrove; marsh; natural climate solution; rehabilitation; seagrass.

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Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Restored blue carbon stocks (aboveground and belowground, AGB and BGB) tend to be 2–800 times higher than in degraded/converted/bare sites, and methane (CH4) fluxes can be four times less than degraded/converted/bare sites, depending on habitats and age. For example, (a) seagrasses, bare versus (vs) restored (Oreska et al., 2020); (b) Mangrove, converted/degraded vs restored (Sasmito et al., ; Rosentreter et al., 2021) and (c) tidal marshes; converted/degraded vs restored (Stagg and Mendelssohn, ; Iram et al., ; Shao et al., ; Kelsall et al., 2023); refer to the original references for details; positive values indicate an increase and negative values indicate a decrease.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Interlinked socioeconomic, governance and biophysical constraints can lead to low blue carbon restoration success.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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