Local scientists have proposed a comprehensive mapping of the Caribbean’s ‘blue carbon’ resources, as part of the answer to the effective management of climate change threats to the region’s multibillion-dollar blue economy.

Blue carbon refers to organic carbon captured and stored by oceans and coastal ecosystems, and in particular by vegetated coastal ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows, tidal marshes and mangroves.

The destruction or degradation of such blue carbon resources causes the emission of greenhouse gases, which fire the warming of the planet that fuels climate change.

“The Caribbean has yet to quantify its blue carbon stocks, which limits its ability to leverage the public global good that their maintenance, conservation and preservation brings,” writes physicist Professor Michael Taylor and others in the October 2020 book The Caribbean Blue Economy.

Taylor, together with other noted scientists, including Professor Mona Webber, Dr Tannecia Stephenson and Felicia Whyte, authored the book chapter titled ‘Implications of climate change for Blue Economies in the Wider Caribbean’.

“Arguably, the Caribbean should lead the efforts for equivalent compensation agreements as exists for the preservation and compensation of forestry (e.g., the REDD+mechanism) given the size of the resources it may possess and the immense vulnerability of those resources to climate change,” the researchers write.

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