Blue Carbon

Our oceans and our climate are tightly linked with both experiencing unprecedented changes that risk the stability of our planet for future generations. In this Ocean Decade, Blue Carbon offers a ray of hope. Blue Carbon is a term that describes all of the carbon dioxide pulled out of the earth’s atmosphere and stored in marine ecosystems. We have discovered that these marine ecosystems are far more efficient at sequestering carbon than land-based ecosystems and trap carbon for thousands of years. These Blue Carbon ecosystems are often described as carbon hot spots or carbon sinks. When these locations are damaged or disturbed, all of the carbon that was sequestered in marine sediment is released back into the environment, exacerbating the impacts of climate change. The most common Blue Carbon ecosystems worldwide are salt marshes, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and kelp beds.

Images by Shane Gross and Cristina Mittermeier. 

Beneath The Waves is actively involved in Blue Carbon projects across the Caribbean, encompassing one of the planet’s most significant areas of resilience ever surveyed. Spanning seagrass meadows, mangrove forests, estuaries, and shallow sandbanks, our project sites are also home to some of the most threatened marine species such as tiger sharks and sea turtles. Beneath The Waves is working to protect these carbon-rich banks, and our ocean’s regulatory systems so that these nursery grounds can continue to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change. New advances and discoveries by our team are allowing Blue Carbon to become a market-based solution that actively protects vital parts of our ocean. For decades it was assumed that vast expanses of our tropical seas may be rich Blue Carbon habitats, but they have never been fully explored or protected… Until now.