DEEPTI’S RESEARCH DISPATCH
Blue Carbon: Research Tidbit #2
The forests of the sea.
Ocean mist hangs on my windows at dawn. I’m bundled up indoors, slouched on my sofa with my laptop, cramming for a class presentation at 8am. It’s for a course on climate change that I took of my own accord.
The cramming gives me nostalgia for college, though I rarely saw the dawn then.
My team-of-three’s assigned topic is ‘ocean-based mitigation strategies’, and my sub-topic is ‘blue carbon’.
What I read
Mainly, the 2019 UN High Level Panel Report: The Ocean as a Solution to Climate Change Action, referred to here as ‘UN HLP report’, and a few additional articles as supporting research.
What I knew going in
At first, absolutely nothing! I’d never heard the term ‘blue carbon’ before.
As I read a bit more, I learned that blue carbon refers to coastal ecosystems.
Mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass beds are highly productive vegetated coastal ecosystems, which are referred to as “blue carbon” ecosystems, analogous to “green carbon” ecosystems on land (Nelleman et al. 2009). They are hotspots for carbon storage, with soil carbon sequestration rates per hectare…
