Implementing Sustainable Blue Carbon Initiatives as a Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss Solution: Restoration Considerations and Upending Conventional Top-Down Governance

Abstract

As international institutions (e.g., UN; World Bank), state and non-state actors, the private sector, and civil society confront the interconnected crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, an unassuming nature-based solution (NbS) fringes coastlines worldwide, ready to confront these borderless issues. Blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) – the vegetated coastal habitats of mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes – are outsized performers in carbon sequestration as well as biodiversity enhancement. Yet institutional actors not only overlook deployment of BCEs in the battle against climate change, they also sanction their destruction, exacerbating rather than mitigating environmental harms. This reality raises the question of what factors would incentivize blue carbon ecosystem restoration and enhance the prospects for sustainable restoration initiatives as an intervention for climate change and biodiversity loss? The guiding hypothesis is that an integrated community-based approach to BCE rehabilitation, emphasizing social considerations, increases opportunities for sustainable initiatives that maximize blue carbon’s mitigation and adaptation potential. This thesis first argues that the economic and social-ecological benefits of BCEs should catalyze increased implementation of coastal ecosystem restoration initiatives. Second, it argues that a departure from the conventional top-down market-based approach to conservation can turn the tide on BCE loss, sustainably and equitably maximizing BCE capacity by engaging and empowering communities in project development and management. In answering the research question, this study synthesizes research, economic and social theoretical arguments, sustainability principles, and original case studies to address the following knowledge gaps: the dearth of literature on the social considerations of blue carbon ecosystem restoration (e.g., community reliance on BCEs, incorporation of local and traditional knowledge, land tenure rights, participatory inclusion); the relative lack of scholarship on blue carbon co-benefits (e.g., shoreline protection; livelihood impacts; biodiversity enhancement) as compared to the market-based focus on BCE carbon sequestration potential; and the lack of social science research as compared to hard science research on BCEs. In addressing these gaps, this thesis concludes that an integrated community-based approach to BCE restoration empowers communities, establishing an equitable and economically viable pathway to sustaining coastal ecosystems and optimizing their social-ecological benefits while capturing atmospheric carbon. This research hopes to inform a collaborative, socially just governance framework and incentivize national and subnational development of BCE initiatives to mitigate environmental harms and build resilient communities.