This threatens the integrity of blue carbon credit – generated by coastal carbon sequestration tasks – as a mechanism to preserve the area’s mangroves, which may retailer three to 5 instances extra carbon per hectare than rainforests.
The research, led by College of Queensland researcher Valerie Kwan, discovered that aquaculture, adopted by rice and palm oil cultivation, is more likely to pose the best deforestation threat within the close to time period, with hotspots present in Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines.
After bearing in mind the danger of injury from cyclones and sea-level rise, about 85 per cent of investable mangrove forests might expertise main losses over the subsequent century, threatening 15.9 million tonnes value of carbon dioxide sequestration potential annually, alongside coastal defence capabilities, the report stated.
Up to now, blue carbon tasks solely make up a handful of the 1000’s of tasks listed in carbon credit verifier Verra’s registry. In the meantime, demand for blue carbon credit has surged lately, as seen from the oversubscribed public sale of credit from the world’s largest mangrove restoration undertaking in Pakistan, generally known as the Delta Blue Carbon Venture, again in 2023 at US$29.72 per tonne.
Regardless of the value premium they seem to take pleasure in within the voluntary carbon market, researchers estimate that blue carbon credit can probably solely generate extra income than commodity manufacturing for 37 per cent of investable mangrove tasks in Southeast Asia.
Even at US$200 per tonne, the pricier credit would nonetheless barely cowl a 3rd of the prices required to preserve the identical quantity of investable mangroves, or people who meet the additionality criterion for carbon credit score certification, in response to the research.
Blue carbon inadequate to shut funding hole
Given the bounds to blue carbon financing, the researchers instructed that blended finance, the place public and philanthropic funds are used to catalyse non-public investments, may be wanted to shut the conservation funding hole. As well as, different ecosystem providers, reminiscent of coastal safety, is also leveraged in novel funding mechanisms, the report stated.
Whereas present requirements already incorporate some extent of implementation dangers, reminiscent of via buffer credit, the place a proportion of carbon credit is withheld from sale and solely launched if undertaking integrity is maintained over a set time interval, the authors flagged that “some terrestrial tasks are near exhausting their buffer swimming pools as a consequence of excessive frequencies of pure drivers of carbon loss”.
This might equally be noticed in mangroves in high-risk areas sooner or later, they famous, including that strengthening threat mitigation efforts could be vital for tasks to generate constructive conservation outcomes over the long run.
One measure the research really helpful undertaking builders to think about is the inclusion of community- and Indigenous-managed protected areas to stop land-use conversion.
As well as, the landward migration of mangroves in response to rising sea ranges ought to be factored into conservation plans to construct local weather resilience, although the report warned that the potential for large-scale migration may be restricted by the big proportion of synthetic infrastructure that entrance a big proportion of Southeast Asia’s shoreline.
Whereas a current overview discovered that 47 per cent of mangroves are already included in marine protected areas – suggesting that the Kunming-Montreal World Biodiversity Framework’s goal to guard 30 per cent of the Earth’s land and ocean surfaces has been reached for mangrove areas particularly – the research stated increasing protected areas might stay an efficient conservation measure.
“Nonetheless, the designation of marine protected space standing doesn’t essentially negate permanence dangers,” the research cautioned, including that the decline in non-protected areas viable for commodities manufacturing might drive exploitation inside conservation zones. “Furthermore, pure drivers of mangrove loss, reminiscent of excessive climate occasions and modifications to hydrology, can function throughout a big spatial scale and have an effect on mangroves no matter safety standing.”
