Image Credit: Scientific Frontline
Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary
- Main Discovery: Strategic co-location of blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) such as mangroves and seagrasses with coral reefs creates a synergistic environment that enhances the restoration and resilience of both marine systems.
- Methodology: A conceptual framework was developed by synthesizing existing research on ecosystem interactions to demonstrate how BCEs provide physical, chemical, and biological support to nearby coral reefs.
- Key Data: BCEs actively improve local water quality by raising pH levels to combat ocean acidification, cycling essential nutrients for coral growth, and stabilizing sediments to maintain clear water conditions.
- Significance: This integration offers a novel financial mechanism where carbon capture credits generated by BCEs can be leveraged to fund the costly and often underfunded restoration of coral reefs.
- Future Application: Implementation involves developing specialized carbon credit networks and community-led restoration initiatives that generate local economic opportunities and enhance coastal resilience against extreme weather.
- Branch of Science: Marine Ecology and Sustainability Science
- Additional Detail: The framework emphasizes bottom-up community resilience strategies to ensure project longevity and scalability, reducing reliance on fluctuating top-down federal funding.
As carbon emissions continue to be pumped into the atmosphere at record levels, it will be critical to recapture and sequester as much of these warming gases as possible. While technological approaches face many barriers before they can be scaled up, efforts to capture carbon can rely on proven, natural interventions, like blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs). UConn researcher Mojtaba Fakhraee makes the argument in Nature Sustainability that strategic placement of BCEs can not only sequester carbon, but have the added benefit of helping with the restoration of another vital ecosystem — coral reefs.
Fakhraee explains that BCEs include ecosystems like mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes, and represent nature-based climate solutions by offering a wide range of positive qualities, including physical, chemical, and biological benefits that can improve the life of nearby coral reefs in the coastal system. Unfortunately, these ecosystems have been heavily affected by climate change and other human activities, resulting in extinction in some areas, signaling the need for restoration. However, effective restoration is challenging for many reasons, including securing funding for projects where financial opportunities often fluctuate with changes in governmental priorities.
Fakhraee developed a conceptual framework that details the power in pairing these ecosystems, including a strategy to help fund restoration efforts.
“This is a way to highlight studies that show how they benefit each other in various ways. There has not been an established, organized framework that shows how the co-location of these two can help fight the impacts of climate change. Restoring blue carbon ecosystems is for more than just carbon storage. It can also help bring coral reefs back to life,” says Fakhraee.
Within the framework, Fakhraee pulls together an abundance of research and details the environmental benefits of BCEs and coral reefs, as well as the areas that need further research to successfully implement co-located restoration projects.
One way this happens is through BCEs affecting ocean chemistry; for instance, they can help with ocean acidification by raising the local pH of the water as they capture carbon. When conditions are too acidic, coral reefs begin to die, leading to coral bleaching and the collapse of their ecosystems. BCEs can also enhance the cycling of nutrients, many of which are essential for coral reef growth. BCEs and coral reefs can act as barriers to dissipate wave energy and help stabilize the coastline. They also stabilize sediments, which, if disturbed cloud the water and inhibit coral reef and BCE growth, and if undisturbed, also sequester carbon.
The co-location of BCEs with coral reefs also supports wildlife, such as fishes and invertebrates within these ecosystems, as different life stages may rely on one ecosystem, and later life stages may require relocation to the other. Co-location can lead to positive outcomes for these populations by enhancing their chances of survival.
Fakhraee says more work is needed to understand the limits of these systems, in terms of their capacity for carbon removal, how long they store carbon, variations in capacity across different types of BCEs, and their carbon sequestration capabilities when following extreme weather events.
Considering inconsistencies in sources of federal funding, Fakhraee says another important aspect of co-location is that it could provide stable avenues for using carbon capture credits to fund coral reef restoration efforts. Therefore, when possible, restoration efforts could be intentionally placed to ensure mutual benefits arising from that co-location.
“That’s the whole idea. It provides another potential revenue source for restoring those heavily impacted ecosystems,” says Fakhraee. “These co-locations also offer new opportunities for the coastal communities to be resilient to climate change and provide new jobs that have not been available before.”
Fakhraee highlights the need to establish carbon credit and trading networks for these kinds of projects:
“The framework presents a new conceptual way of using these two ecosystems to fight climate change, while also presenting the possibility for doing more research because it’s going to be much more complicated to develop new models and to develop a new funding system. These are the things that needs to be better explored moving forward.”
Even nature-based solutions need funding to scale up, and now that most, if not all federal support is no longer available for these kinds of projects, Fakhraee says it raises the question of whether we will be able to implement carbon capture at scale or not. In the meantime, we need to think creatively on how to secure funding for these kinds of projects.
For Fakhraee, these top-down funding obstacles bring up the importance of building resilience from the bottom up. In other words, there is great power in building resilience starting in the communities. These ecosystems can boost tourism and become self-sustaining meaning their survival would not be reliant on fluctuations in availability of federal funding.
“The more benefits communities see for adopting those different technologies, the more encouraged they become to do that, and then this is going to help us with the scaling of these carbon capture technologies,” says Fakhraee. “Without this community support and without showing the obvious benefits that these different approaches have, it would be almost impossible to envision a case where we have a larger scale deployment of the carbon capture technologies.”
Reference material: What Is: Ecosystem
Published in journal: Nature Sustainability
Title: Blue carbon ecosystems and coral reefs as coupled nature-based climate solutions
Authors: Mojtaba Fakhraee
Source/Credit: University of Connecticut | Elaina Hancock
Reference Number: eco020926_01
