Coastal Blue Carbon Manual

Coastal ecosystems are critical to maintaining human well-being and global biodiversity. Mangroves, tidal salt marshes, and seagrasses sequester and store significant amounts of coastal blue carbon from the atmosphere and ocean. These environments are now recognized for their role in mitigating climate change.

Conservation and restoration of these coastal ecosystems has been increasingly addressed in international and national climate change mitigation policy and finance mechanisms. However, many countries haven't incorporated coastal blue carbon into their portfolio of climate change mitigation or coastal management policies and actions, largely because the mechanisms for assessing blue carbon were not well defined or standardized.

To address this concern, the International Blue Carbon Initiative’s team of 34 experts in the fields of coastal carbon measurement, remote sensing, and climate policy compiled a set of standardized protocols for sampling methods, laboratory measurements, and analysis of blue carbon stocks and fluxes. The manual they produced—Coastal Blue Carbon: methods for assessing carbon stocks and emissions factors in mangroves, tidal salt marshes, and seagrass meadows—provides scientists and coastal managers with a practical tool to produce robust blue carbon data.

To download the free manual, users need to indicate the type of work they do and the country where their work takes place.