Business Day (Johannesburg)
Tamar Kahn
16 October 2009
Cape Town — Governments should consider setting up a "blue carbon" fund to invest in marine ecosystems to help combat climate change, the United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep) said this week.
The ocean's "blue carbon sinks", such as mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grasses -- all of which are found in SA -- played a crucial role in capturing and storing carbon dioxide in ocean sediment, yet had received scant attention from policy makers negotiating a new deal on climate change, said Unep's executive director, Achim Steiner.
"It is not only in the technology domain that answers to emission reduction can be found. We should go back to how this planet has, over millions of years, perfected the art of capturing ... carbon," he said.
Steiner's remarks came as the UN's Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said it was still possible to clinch a deal at the climate change talks in Copenhagen in December. Talks for a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges 37 rich nations to cut emissions by an average of 5% from 1990 levels by 2008-12, are deadlocked on the question of cuts. Developed nations will also have to come up with billions of dollars in climate aid and green technologies for the poor.
Steiner said the climate change talks were expected to see nations agreeing to pay developing economies to maintain the "green carbon" in forests, and a similar initiative should be considered to safeguard the "blue carbon" in oceans.
Citing a new report from Unep, Steiner warned that the ocean's natural carbon sinks were being destroyed at an accelerating rate. Up to 7% of its "blue carbon sinks" were being lost each year, seven times the rate of loss 50 years ago. The most crucial marine ecosystems in this regard were mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grasses, which covered just 0,5% of the seabed but accounted for about 70% of carbon stored in ocean sediments.
"They are disappearing rapidly due to pressures from urban construction, dredging for ports and navigation channels, and upstream activities such as damming and irrigation," said one of the report's authors, Emily Corcoran.
"In some places these habitats are disappearing faster than rainforests -- something we've all been made aware of," she said.
"It's a resource that can help us achieve the goals and targets governments are negotiating at the moment (and) it's a relatively simple and cheap proposition to invest in managing these areas to stop the loss," she said.
Restoring marine ecosystems could offset between 3% and 7% of current fossil fuel emissions, or 27000-million tons of carbon dioxide in two decades -- more than half that projected for reducing rainforest deforestation, said the report. Blue carbon could be traded and handled in a similar way to green carbon (such as rainforests) and should be included in emission and climate change mitigation protocols, said the report. With Reuters
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