 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to the first Sidewind at the IAEA climate Atoms for Climate Pavilion at this COP conference. My name is Jana Friedrich, and I am IAEA Marine Laboratory in Monaco. IAEA is investigating the potential of coastal coastal vegetated ecosystem as natural climate solution to increase the drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere and long-term storage in the sediments. You can see in the back a very simplified sketch of what coastal blue carbon means. It's very simplified and we are discussing today more about the advantages or the other effects it could have. So this round table shall discuss the effectiveness of this coastal blue carbon ecosystems in storing carbon and in carbon sequestration and the potential of these ecosystems also to preserve biodiversity. So CO2 is taken up by plants and coastal ecosystems like mangroves, seagrasses or salt marshes all from seaweed and as in your garden if the plants die you put it on the compost they start accumulating and they'll remain where they are in the ideal case. So we shall discuss the effectiveness of this nature-based solution today. I'm more than pleased to welcome our panelists today so as you can imagine we are not doing this work at IAEA alone we are collaborating and I have well-known experts on my side and I welcome Dr. Anna Keros and she is from Plymouth Marine Laboratory. She's a seabed and climate change ecologist and she's doing research into the role of natural and farmed seaweed ecosystems and also the seafloor within the ocean carbon cycle. She's a member of the blue carbon initiative and the very seascape carbon so very welcome. Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso to my right he is CNRS researcher at Sorbonne University and associate scientist at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. He is doing research into the effects of ocean acidification and warming on marine ecosystems and ecosystem services and into ocean-based solutions to mitigate and to adapt to climate change. To my left, I warmly welcome Professor Carlos Duarte. He is a researcher at Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He is marine ecologist and and he addressed the impacts of marine by T and marine ecosystems and their capacity to recover and he is doing research into blue carbon for more than a decade so very welcome. So I would like to ask my I'm sorry I forgot our online panelist Dr. Kip Coriol Aratsigi Langat. Could you could you please show the picture? So Dr. Langat is from Kenya Marine and Fisheries Institute and he's ecologist with a focus on conservation and sustainable management particularly on blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves and seagrass in the western Indian Ocean. So I would like to ask all my panelists now to give a five-minute statement on their view a potential of coast blue carbon ecosystem due to drawdown from the atmosphere. Professor Duarte, would you like to start? Thank you very much. It is my pleasure to join the first event of the Atoms for Peace pavilion in Africa because we're meeting in Africa today which is an important region for blue carbon development and I'd like to put a bit of context on blue carbon so our understanding of the role of humans in releasing greenhouse gases and affecting the climate is actually a bit biased towards land so when we look at the carbon budget we learned that about 38 percent of the excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have not been released by fossil fuel burning but actually by destroying ecosystems, changing ecosystems and by agriculture and other practices. This term is called land use change but in fact hidden in that 38 percent of greenhouse emission there's a component from the ocean. We don't have a component in the carbon budget that is land ocean change but in fact it does contribute. It does it initiated with the hunting of whales of which we have only 10% left of the great whales of the ocean. Each whale moves the amount of carbon of 1000 trees so when we lost 90% of the whales there was already an impact and we burned the whales. We didn't eat them. We burned them as oil to light the streets of Europe and North America so it was a fuel that we used. We used them as fuel and the CO2 that used to be whale is already in the atmosphere. Then we destroyed mangroves and starting around the 1800s we started to log mangroves around the world and then due to poor water quality and coastal development then we lost also seagrass and we realigned short lines and converted wetlands around the world salt marshes into agricultural soils. It's by this Southeast Asia and agricultural soils in Europe and North America so we have actually changed massively ocean ecosystems and that component is hidden within this 38% of coal land use chains. The ocean is part of the 38% and therefore should be part of the solution as well. So during the 1990s I think it's a generic problem because I come from another event same so it will be a bit intermittent. The parts that you will miss are the most interesting ones so then we did research that showed that coastal ecosystems like mangrove, seagrass, kill forest and salt marshes are the most intense carbon sinks in the biosphere. So we showed that during the 1990s and in the around 2005 we had the first inventory of the contribution to carbon sequestration but by then we had lost about half of the global extent of these ecosystems. So in 2009 I was a co-author of a report from different UN agencies that coined the term blue carbon referring to the role of avoiding the further loss and also restoring marine ecosystems as a component of climate action and climate mitigation. By that time when the report was released in 2009 and it was the first time that the term blue carbon was used there were already some massive projects of ecosystem restoration not driven by climate action but driven by the protective role and benefits of these ecosystems. For instance in the Mekong Delta after the American war as the Vietnamese referred to the war then they embarked in restoring 2500 square kilometers of mangrove in the Mekong forest that the U.S. Air Force had destroyed with a combination of napalm and herbicides. So within 10 years they reforested this area and I think still today remains the largest ecosystem restoration project ever undertaken by humans. It was not driven by climate it was driven by the awareness of the Vietnamese people of the significance of the mangrove for their food security. Now when the awareness of the importance of these activities for climate action came about then scientists in Vietnam went on and calculated the carbon benefits of that restoration project and the restoration of the Mekong mangrove Delta actually contributed during 15 years to mitigate five years worth of national emissions of Vietnam. So in fact a very significant contribution other projects were conducted for instance sigras restoration in the U.S. again driven by biodiversity outcomes but they showed to have a significance potential for climate action and greenhouse gas mitigation and now the Commonwealth of Virginia has published already two years ago a law to regulate the carbon of these sigras metals and sigras restoration and in fact the Philadelphia Eagles football team in the U.S. has invested in achieving their carbon neutrality goals through investing in sigras. We still don't know for mangroves and salmarses we have very good data on the trends and global abundance but for sigras we're still learning. So last week we released a paper in the journal Nature Communications where we discovered the largest sigras metal in the world and that was in the Bahamas and that sigras metal we estimated to be up to 92,000 square kilometers. So that becomes now the largest blue carbon ecosystem and it shows that the potential of the ocean to contribute to climate mitigation is much broader than we thought so a significant fraction of that 38 percent of greenhouse emissions can be reversed by conserving and restoring these habitats. So a last point is that I'd like to make a link why we're having this conversation here and is that whereas on land most of the carbon is stored in biomass in aquatic ecosystems the carbon is stored in the soils. So to estimate accurately the carbon removal and the carbon sequestration we actually use isotopes and I've been working with the IAEA for now these four years to calculate based on isotopes of lead the rates of accumulation of carbon in these ecosystems. Thank you. Thank you Professor Duarte. I would like to give now the floor to Dr. Keros. Thank you Yana and can you hear me? Thank you Yana and thank you to Peri for inviting me to this important conversation. It is a very timely matter we have received a number of reports this week about the state of the world of the climate system and that's we are I think it's really in the fore of everyone at COP 27 that we don't have a lot of time to act so it's important to also bring to the fore the role of blue carbon ecosystems and ocean carbon in helping us to to slow down climate change so I come from a background of seabed ecology and ocean spatial management and I hope I would inspire this this audience today about the things that we can do on blue carbon where we should be really moving very quickly now is the time to be implementing so what do we know so firstly we know that as mentioned today a lot of the ocean carbon is on the seabed on the seafloor and very much like fossil fuels really we need to leave it there so now is not the time to be digging up the ocean floor the ocean floor the soft sediments cover about 84% of the ocean seabed so that's almost two thirds of our planet and they house huge stores of carbon for our planet leaving them there is the best thing that we can do in terms of limiting emissions from the ocean at this point in time so conserving this habitat is extremely important and we are failing on that so we need to be acting on that now that is in the hands of individual countries already we can do that today the second thing is that in in order to keep growing those stores we need to also be protecting the ocean processes that lead to the ocean serving as a sink of co2 for our planet and in in that way in regulating the ocean climate system and the global climate system and so that means that we need to protect not just the stores but also the processes the flows of carbon across the ocean the what we call seascape carbon fluxes and to better understand where those sequestration hot spots are so not just in the wetlands but also across the ocean floor and in the deep ocean we have some way to go on that we have a bit of science that we still need to do to deliver that but understanding these fluxes better and the location of these carbon sequestration hot spots in the ocean would allow us to have better accounting for the global carbon cycle and that would mean that we can design and implement conservation strategies that would protect those processes in those sites and therefore gain support for that conservation movement that at the moment is failing we have many pressures on ocean space that are competing with these with the conservation of these sites at the moment thirdly in protecting these sites these hot spots of sequestration in the ocean these areas of the sea floor very rich in ocean carbon we would also be protecting biodiversity so that goes from the coastline from the wetlands as well as to the deep ocean so in addressing and protecting these sites we are addressing not just the climate change emergency but also the biodiversity crisis so these are all things that we can already do at the moment we need to talk about implementing so these are the no-brainers right so where are the boundaries what else do we need to do so clearly we don't have a lot of time to act for instance there was this report I think yesterday about from the cryosphere giving us a terminal warning for our for our ice caps in the poles so we really need to be acting fast so we need not just to protect what the ocean is already doing for us naturally but we also need to be looking at these active strategies for carbon dioxide removal and to do that we have a range of options a range of strategies in front of us but I think it's a huge area of research is really where the science is really growing in the last decade but we have some time to go some some work to do still and I think we need to inject a bit of realism into this conversation as well so I spend a lot of time working with ocean planners so people that decide on how we use ocean space and actually REZs are completely packed with human activities it is very difficult to allocate new space to new activities so for instance one of the carbon dioxide removal strategy is currently under investigation in the ocean seaweed farming for that to have a tangible effect on co2 emissions to even touch on one percent of our global co2 emissions yearly we would need to grow this sector by six percent every year between now and the middle of the century so that then we are talking about an area of about 70 000 square kilometers or about per scale about half a kilometer all around the coastline of the US just dedicated for seaweed farming now that might be might not be a very big number in the grand scheme of themes of things and it's certainly a small number if we think about the global biome for seaweed but if we think about ocean space it's actually a not a trivial number so what we need to do in this conversation about blue carbon and carbon dioxide removal is that we need to be bringing others with us we need to be talking about not just the colleagues in the research community and in the finance community that are interested in this topic we're bringing others with us across the policy landscape across the blue economy we need to listen to the naysayers we need to listen to their concerns and provide the evidence to demonstrate that we can do this tangibly now and that we have the evidence to do it in a safe and effective manner and lastly if you'll allow me to to close my my intervention I would like to raise that we need to also be thinking about this in a climate smart way so we need to be designing these strategies with the realization that the ocean is changing already very much that climate change is already having an effect on our ocean ecosystems and we'll continue to have in the next few decades unfortunately because we've been so slow on climate action and because of this none of these cdr technologies based on the ocean will be effective if we don't think about their resilience where are the climate refugees for these blue carbon habitats where are the areas where these blue carbon habitats will continue to function effectively in the next few decades so without climate resilient approaches to blue carbon management we will not be effective so I would like to thank the IAA for having me your role has been extremely important in supporting blue carbon research around the world and I'm very glad to be here with you today and to listen to your questions thank you thank you very much for your statement I would like to invite now professor so provide this state morning everyone thank you very much Yana for the invitation I am also very pleased to be at this inaugural side event of this pavilion and also in good company with Anna and Carlos blue carbon has gained a lot of attention recently since the term was coined as Carlos described it has attracted a lot of attention because of the carbon that is stored in the soil also because it is a natural based solutions and it has multiple benefits and the traction has been such that I yesterday at the high level segment I have just a few quotes from high level people the director of the London School of Economics said carbon markets should be a source of income for carbon sink in carbon sink rich countries also the representative from Bremen said that she urged the to promote nature based solutions that help restore ecosystem services and preserve societies the president of the Seychelles quote said that mangroves and seagrass beds not only clean up domestic emissions but also those of the rest of the world and finally last quote by Kenyan president for the African group he said carbon credits are Kenya's next significant export he urged developing carbon markets that help communities and not intermediaries it really shows that this blue carbon has gained a lot of attention and quite just but there is an issue with accounting and as you know perhaps as part of the Kyoto protocol there was a scheme called red plus which promoted the reforestation on land and there was very perverse incentives and they were loopholes that some companies used to deliver credits which were not justified so I think it is important that we make sure that those accounting issues do not occur for blue carbon systems and recently we have reviewed the literature and we have described four areas seven areas in which blue carbon research should be performed and that is in order to have verification systems that are honest and that carbon credits are given were justified you can be sure that when money is at stake there will be lots of people predators jumping to the money those uncertainties are related to the fact that blue carbon storage is very very variable according to study sites and even within the same study site there is also issues with emissions of non of other greenhouse gases such as methane that need to be measured in order to have a proper accounting complication with calcium carbonate precipitation and dissolution lateral transport from elsewhere and also to the open ocean which is quite quite good because that's a very nice way to store carbon to put it in the deep ocean and perhaps very importantly the permanency of the carbon storage is also very critical those blue carbon ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts for example in 2015 40 million trees died in the northeast of australia in the mangrove which shows really that this permanency issue is very difficult of course to control it had nothing to do with climate change it had something to do with a new event which reduced the water available to those to those trees so the message is one needs to be very honest we need to develop research in all those areas to lift those uncertainties as fast as possible and of course what I have discussed about is the role of mitigation but as we said earlier there are many other benefits to blue carbon ecosystems in terms of coastal protection in terms of food security in terms of water quality the water quality is much improved maintaining biodiversity so it's a no-brainer that those ecosystems need to be conserved and in fact in the previous study actually with Carlos we described those systems as low regret ocean solutions low regret because even though the share to mitigation is small although every share is important there is no magic bullet but they provide so many benefits that we know how to do that Carlos described the restoration of the main con delta they are also very big success stories restoring salt marshes we know how to do it it should be done but we must be very careful with providing carbon credits thank you thank you very much as you highlighted it's very important the co-benefits are very important so benefits for protecting or restoring biodiversity also fishing ground for local people um coastal protection there are many co-benefits and this takes me to our next panelist um Dr Alangat could you please in okay can you hear me could you unmute your mic please okay yes we can hear you please provide your statement from the perspective of conservation okay thank you um and i would like to thank uh so uh giving me opportunity to participate in this unfortunately i couldn't make it on time to come in person uh i would also like to thank my fellow families um and also um uh we have not met a lot of people also and the rest and from the Kenyan perspective uh look upon the ecosystem particularly my groups and free grasses uh in most of the time i've been overlooked by um uh by various institutions and governments uh they have not been included in even uh greenhouse gas uh emissions um i'm trying to look uh they've not been included in the greenhouse gas emission accounting and in most cases they used to be recovered as wastelands but fortunately uh with institutions like temporary uh we have been able to create awareness on the on the importance of this ecosystem which i would not want to to i like more because my colleagues have already mentioned but i would like to uh maybe mention some of the key uh treatments we have done actually i started from uh from kenya one if we have been able now to look at them the map to this ecosystem uh track the changes in them like uh in um for example from 1996 to 2020 we have been able to track and uh see what are the uh the changes which have occurred which have resulted also in the carbon emission from this ecosystem and we also did some uh uh experiments on carbon emissions using uh uh using uh service uh solution experiment and also uh service elevation and we showed that there is uh when you have and control conservation of this ecosystem they will contribute significantly to the carbon emission um what we also have done is include communities in conservation of this ecosystem uh particularly the mangroves where they can now be legally involved uh for example in kenya they can be legally involved in conservation by forming liquid entities and then secondly uh they can also uh using the model of uh fisheries uh they can also be able to be involved in conservation of these grasses um what um um we we we know from this ecosystem is that they can be good potential or productive um tools for metaphase solution particularly the climate uh ocean climate action which uh it has been shown that the ocean can provide about 81 percent of um of what is needed to reduce uh or to be on the 1.5 degrees pathway and also these mangroves can constitute about uh 10 percent of these uh uh percentage and um we have also shown that when you have when you invest in conservation of this ecosystem using our example in kenya and the rest of the world you can get up to what we call the return on investment of about six percent I mean six to one ratio that if you invest one one dollar you are able to recoup about six dollars um uh when you invest on this ecosystem so they provide great opportunities what we require now is for us to be able to quantify for example we have we need to have complete carbon package for use of a system what what do you mean excuse me dr langa it's very difficult to hear you it's not your problem we have some sound problems unfortunately we cannot hear you I thank you very much for your statement but the the noise here I'm sorry thank you very much okay thank you okay um I apologize for the for the sound quality so I guess there is room for improvement for the for for virtual uh participants with this I would like to enter into the the panel this cup and I would like to throw a question into the round of my panelists what is your opinion how mature is our understanding of the potential of coastal vegetated ecosystems in sequestering carbon um at a global scale uh ecosystems as uh for me who would like to start to answer there are many many estimates um but due to the uncertainties even the uncertainty of the surface area of blue carbon systems it's very uncertain it's very uncertain how much each of them stores um the IPCC in the special report for on the ocean and the and the cryosphere said that it is less than one to two percent of the 20 2015 CO2 emissions so it's a very small share but as I said earlier uh you know there is no magic solution every wedge will be very critical to for mitigation so it should be done and as I said so it should be implemented in order to reap all the benefits I would like to first it doesn't work but first as a piece of technical advice because I'm coming from another pavilion also opening I think the issue is that the space is saturated with the frequency of microphones there's probably a thousand microphones in this space and they're interfering with each other and the phones so I would recommend that you try to get cable cable microphones and that will remove the issue so that's a not blue carbon but probably a useful suggestion but I'd like to post on a thing more broadly about blue carbon in my opinion blue carbon is just a start and it's significant because the first time in I would say possibly worse than history because there are some other cultures that have other values but it's the first time that marine ecosystems have value other than death right so usually we derive value from the ocean by killing it we take fees we remove mangroves I use and use it as as wood but up to now there is no value no monetary value no market value on living marine ecosystems so blue carbon is the first time that there is a monetary value for repairing damaged coastal ecosystems and also a protecting ecosystems that are threatened in my opinion that is far more significant than you know the conversation today about climate it is a game changer in terms of how we interact with the ocean so please keep that in mind and that's very very important for communities particularly in the global south island states which have been waiting for help from developed nations for now seven years until the Paris Accord and that help is not coming so they need to use the resources they have and they have to implement the the solutions they have they know how to restore mangroves they know how to restore sun masses they know how to protect them and yes while addressing all of the uncertainties that Jean Pierre brought to our attention and I just would like to point out that the scientific effort on blue carbon is rising exponentially so we are actually on the track of addressing those uncertainties we need to make sure that we don't make and because Jean Pierre come from Sorbonne then I like to quote a French philosopher Voltaire we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good so blue carbon delivers a lot of benefits for communities it protects shelter protects provides adaptation capacity provides food and contributes to mitigate climate change again we need to be very very robust and very demanding on the quality of the data that eventually leads to the release of carbon grades but do consider that this is very significant for many nations and for instance I'm working with with one leader in Africa to also activate blue carbon solutions in the Atlantic coast and Kenya is a trendsetter for blue carbon in in Africa so we need to consider that the global north might activate solutions like geoengineering might do direct air capture but for the global south where the pain of climate change is the steepest blue carbon is a contribution you can have delivering benefits to your communities thank you very much would you like to come into the discussion as well may I add a comment thank you um about the potential limit again I don't know that this microphone is working but uh you can hear me so uh maybe you can hear me now so about the potential so um I would like to talk about that because at the moment uh when we talk about blue carbon we are predominantly talking about our wetlands and our wetlands are extremely important they house maybe six times as much carbon in their soil as the rainforest so these are quite substantial areas that we need to be protecting very much as Carlo and Carlos and Jean Pierre were saying but if we think about the broader ocean there is much more potential that remains untapped when we think about blue carbon and carbon accounting in general so for instance Jean Pierre mentioned in the IPCC we we think that wetlands contribute to maybe one or two percent of mitigation of global CO2 emissions but the ocean is much broader than that and for instance uh seaweed are the marine marine organisms that have the highest CO2 fluxes in terms of macrophytes in terms of large plants so uh in terms of the our global accounting of carbon is very poorly developed at the moment the models that we use to estimate for instance CO2 emissions at the global level and they're painting the IPCC assessment does not account for seaweed which we think are huge fixers of CO2 in the ocean and predominantly many of these models using the global assessment do not characterize the seafloor where we think that the largest reserves of ocean of ocean carbon are in the deep ocean so we have a huge path to go in terms of the research which is very prolific at the moment but our carbon carbon accounting for the ocean is not perfect at the moment and we need to improve this very quickly thank you thank you very much I would like to pass the word now to professor Catozo just one one addition when I said that the blue carbon ecosystems have the potential to store one to two percent of the global CO2 emissions of course when you look at regional or even at country level it could be much more than that for example Indonesia has a lot of blue carbon ecosystems and the share of blue carbon restoration in Indonesia or in Vietnam or Cambodia is much bigger than one to two percent so sometimes the global numbers hide a lot of information there so there is indeed a large variability geographically between the regions but also within one region one type of vegetated ecosystem for the for the carbon drawdown that that is that is clear but still well it's very valuable could it be a solution perhaps instead of looking at this natural ecosystem to use farm farm seaweed so I'm looking at you because you did some research into that topic so what is your opinion on using seaweed farming as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change when sinking it into the deep sea so what are the unintended side effects that could occur so one has to evaluate the positive and the unwanted side effect what's your opinion on that thank you for this question in fact we are about to release a study that we conducted in collaboration with the IAEA which is the first time that the carbon sequestration with seaweed farming has been quantified globally so we have done that in 26 farms around the world in 13 nations and over the period of two years with an important contribution of IAEA to estimate sequestration rates and just to give you an indication the oldest seaweed farm in our study is in Tokyo Bay that has been in operation for 300 years and the largest seaweed farm in our study is in China and is 150 square kilometers in size so you can see it from a space in the western world seaweed farming is really non-existent totally we have less than one square kilometer of farms in the western world because of cultural reasons but the total farm area in the world is about 2,000 square kilometers and in Africa it's about five percent and 95 percent of that farm area is in Asia China Indonesia the second largest producer then Malaysia and other nations so we postulated some years ago that seaweed farming might contribute to carbon sequestration between because during the growth period the seaweed release particles and material that settle to the sea floor and may accumulate there like they do in seagrass meadows but up to now we have not a single estimate of how much this represents so by now we have assessed those 26 farms and the median carbon sequestration rate on the source below the farm is about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare per year I'm very mind that none of these seaweed farms were designed to sequester carbon so it's a big room to optimize the removal process and the most intense sink was in Indonesia and was removing nine tons of carbon dioxide per hectare per year and we have actually quantified these over the lifespan of the farms going in Japan before World War II so it's not just a recent estimate but those are very robust long-term estimates so I think that is an important benefit of seaweed farming and we calculate that with the multiple benefits that seaweed farming bring about we could sustainably farm about three million square kilometers of ocean area which is still 20 times less than what we farm online so our mindset needs to change and look at the ocean as a source not only of climate solutions but also of food and other sustainable materials seaweed also remove carbon dioxide of course during their growth and therefore they provide refugia from ocean acidification and also ocean deoxygenation so they also provide these farms provide adaptive capacity but whereas I see a huge benefit in providing that element of carbon sequestration with seaweed farming and bring it to the carbon market we are concerned of the ideas of some colleagues that we should take this crop and sink it in the deep sea against carbon crates first because seaweed is a wonderful material it's not just carbon it has a lot of molecules that can help solve many problems on society from delivering polymers that can display synthetic plastics to also feed in the world and also avoiding methane emissions from a ruminants which again if we look at this alone that would be up to 18 percent of removal of greenhouse gas emission because that's the contribution of ruminants through methane emission if we can solve this with seaweed additives to the ruminant diet which has been proven then the potential of seaweed farming to contribute to climate action is really very large so why should we sink it when there are people that suffer from hunger when we also need to formulate sustainable diets for fishing aquaculture so sinking it in my opinion is unethical but we also don't have any understanding of what may be the long-term consequences of sinking masses of seaweed on the seafloor. Thank you very much Professor Duarte would you like to share your opinion on the seaweed farming? I don't have much to say I have no specific expertise but I fully agree with Carlos that it will be unethical at this point to sink this mass of carbon and another benefit of having seaweed farms it's to clean up water because in Southeast Asia many coastal areas are uterified and lots of nutrients that need to be removed to avoid you know blooms of toxic algae or unintended algae so it's a nice way also to improve water clarity and water quality so I think it is a very nice way to do and also using this material instead of sinking it. May I so I spend a lot of time studying this so maybe I can add some more to that I completely agree with what what my co-panelists have said I would also like to highlight that being in Africa in a conference in Africa that in for instance in eastern western Indian Ocean in eastern Africa seaweed are a huge root for out of poverty for women so seaweed farming has very many social benefits as as that we have mentioned but in terms of climate change mitigation we are still some a little bit in the dark so I think we quickly get lost into into what I like to call the Schrodinger seaweed farming which is that we want to farm seaweed because seaweed might help us into sort of lower emissions production pathways by its many uses for medicine for for many cosmetics for many industries but if we want to talk about climate change mitigation we need to be harvesting that biomass and not using it because we need to keep that CO2 away from the atmosphere so that's a paradox at the moment the whole global seaweed farming industry is not developed in that way so we are farming seaweed to use so we are not contributing to climate change mitigation only through avoided emissions through the use of these products instead of products that are more carbon intensive so there is some way to go another thing I would add is that seaweed farms just because we are growing them we are also adding carbon to the ocean carbon fluxes that eventually might lead to sequestration so we already know that some of the arthritis that moves away from farms might end up sequestered on the seabed as Carlos was mentioning as we as happens with natural seaweed communities we also know that the alkalinity pool in the ocean might be a good endpoint for carbon from for inorganic carbon from the seaweed to be sequestered for many thousands of years but the science around each of these topics is very underdeveloped is really in its infancy so for instance recently we have just had a paper accepted where we have provided the first model that tracks carbon from the seaweed to the seafloor and that is one of the ways that the research community can help to develop the design of seaweed farms in future to optimize the location of these sites in in such a way that the the arthritis that is released from the growing biomass ends up in places on the seabed where it might be sequestered so for instance we are working with seaweed farmers in the Netherlands and in the UK to help deliver that so yes so the research community still has an important role to play in the future design of seaweed farms but at the moment seaweed farming is not yet a viable solution on its own we need we have some work to do thank you thank you very much for your insight which comes from direct research now i would okay i give you the floor and then and then i would like to open the floor for the discussion with the audience well i would i would like just to note that we are sitting across the FAO pavilion food and agriculture pavilion and i would like to if i if there's something i'd like you to walk away from this session with is the idea that we need to avoid carbo-centric mines we shouldn't think about carbon only we are embedded in a triple crisis of biodiversity of climate and food this year on the last three years do a combination of war and climate change and covid we have actually undo the progress we had made on alleviating hunger in the world so when we look at nature-based solutions like blue carbon like seaweed farming we shouldn't look at them with a carbon-centric eye we should look at them for the benefits they bring for the triple crisis food security climate climate action and also by the diversity resilience and regeneration thank you very much it is very important to remove to move away from a carbon-centric food and see the co-benefits it has i would like to open out the floor to discussion from the audience so do you have questions to the panelists so for being here um so my question is is the restoration of mangroves going to happen fast enough to outrun the impacts of sea level rise so for example i'm from the florida keys in the united states which is an island chain um and we're already feeling the effects of sea level rise in our mangrove forests are being inundated because they can't move upland fast enough to outrun the sea level rise that we're experiencing um so is this really an effective blue carbon method um or are there other ways that we can have natural defenses yeah so these blue carbon ecosystems they accumulate so much carbon that they raise the seafloor and they continue to raise the seafloor at rates of about one to five millimeters per year the current estimate of the of sea level rise is about 3.8 millimeters per year so right now a sea level rise is rising at a level that is going to outpace the capacity of blue carbon habitats to raise the seafloor but still they do contribute to mitigate that impact or reduce that impact of sea level rise and also they protect the shoreline from storms and cyclones so that's a very important role but on the future a sea level rise continues to accelerate they might be outpaced the capacity of blue carbon habitats to raise the seafloor might be outpaced so some areas might become unsuitable to support a blue carbon habitat so that's something that's being modeled and it's going to set constraints on the global recovery of mangroves and salt marshes but i think there's still only a price to a few areas but consider that the reason why the netherlands is five meters below sea level in on average is because they dried they build the folders to avoid the tides coming in and then the consequence of that is that due to the loss of carbon from the soils and water then subsidence brought the level down when you actually undo that and that has been done in caradine and gaba bay and you remove the seawall you actually have rates of soil accretion of up to one meter per per year so there's actually quite a lot that can be done in alleviating risks to areas at risk from sea level rise by activating blue carbon solutions as well so to illustrate what Carlos was saying you know in 2004 when there was this huge tsunami which affected notably the cost of indonesia it was very striking when the mangrove had been cut in cities or coastal infrastructure was built the destruction was massive absolutely massive just a few kilometers away where mangroves were still standing the damage was much much less so it's it is a fantastic illustration of the benefit of mangroves for coastal protection yeah thank you very much um any other questions i'm a youth let me stand yeah and uh good morning all um i am okay i am mohammed yellow from sirillian um i think uh this session is very important to me um in the sense that um i see it as an option to carbon upprint um so that we can use this um ideology this innovation um to have an option towards uh uh uh the blueprint um in the sense um we for for for example sirillian we are trying as best as much um so that we recycle um these seaweeds um to charcoal so that and uh and we have we have realized that if we um um um um use these seaweeds um to use it as charcoal the end of the day we will have more people um stop cutting trees more people will stop and uh polluting the air and um these seaweeds as well have little of uh uh no have huge amount of energy that can produce after um recycling it as a charcoal because uh we started doing that um uh we we compress the seaweeds um in the in the in the in the tank and we are in we burn it and then of the day we squeeze so that the smoke will not go up yeah we not pollute the air then we allow it for a moment and then of the day we check it and it's all burnt then we we we try to mold it to a smaller particles then we try to um give some communities to use it as a charcoal instead of the normal charcoal they use so while using that it will give you a a lot of heat and the end of the day it will not pollute the air so i believe um um um this is a good innovation and uh this is a good investment so that we support climate change so thank you very much that's my contribution thank you very much would do you like to respond to the statement of the gentleman well just give the example highlights the value of seaweed and the value that seaweed farming can bring to communities so in my study on only uh 26 seaweed farms those 26 seaweed farms employ 27 000 people and out of those 27 000 people 70 percent are women and we actually asked them about how seaweed farming contributed to the livelihoods and not only became an important source of income to their households but they actually empowered them in the role in the communities so also most of the uh innovators that are working on seaweed technology but also seaweed scientists that I know are women and even in Japan they celebrate the mother of the sea who's a u.s scientist that was able to uh resolve the life cycle of uh of the seaweed so it can be cultured so even the mother of the sea is a woman so there's a strong connection between women and seaweed uh not only in terms of uh culture in them but empowering in their communities and also as mentioned by Anna during COVID for instance I was visiting Bali a month ago where they have a lot of seaweed farming and seaweed farming was the only thing that kept the communities away from hunger because 90 percent of the GDP of Bali depends on tourism and they were locked during two years so every household has a small seaweed farm and that is an element of resilience against impacts and and also building these communities thank you very much Anna thank you yeah I wanted to thank our our speaker for for this intervention because it's a really good example of how co2 can contribute to lower carbon industry processes so an alternative to a very high carbon intensive energy source so it's fantastic and this is really what the seaweed industry at the moment is for is for these lower carbon emission pathways for these types of solutions what I would like to say is that uh because we talked about seaweed farming in Africa uh what we are seeing also is the sensitivity of this activity to climate change so for for instance we mentioned the western Indian Ocean and women in the communities for instance in Tanzania in Zanzibar uh who are the main actors uh in this industry and they are losing their crops annually because of heatwave effects the seaweed farming industry is extremely sensitive to these extreme pressures and also too long-term warming and what we will need to see in the coming in the coming years is a redevelopment of a reciting of these activities into areas that are climate refugees that are where people are able to grow seaweed still into the future so this is a big concern at the moment and there is a lot of research that I'm aware of trying to address that thank you thank you very much so we lost one panel we lost one panelist still I would like to ask my remaining panelists for one sentence final statement which summarizes your view on the capacity of blue carbon coastal ecosystems for carbon sequestration and other co-benefits so one sentence uh blue carbon ecosystems that are much valuable not so much at this point for mitigation purposes but for adaptation purposes and it's a low regret option it should be must be implemented my final thought is that we need to be investing in the science to reduce these uncertainties so we can put better constraints of the carbon flux generated in these habitats in our global model so we have better accounting globally of the carbon fluxes in the ocean and in terms of implementation as Jean-Pierre mentioned and we talked about today there are many co-benefits it's a no-brainer so let's just do it thank you very much thank you very much for giving your opinions and sharing also a final statement and as you have heard during this last hour vegetated coastal ecosystems for blue carbon have lots of co-benefits in addition of just storing carbon for a longer time in the sediment it provides coastal production it provides economical income for coastal communities it habitat for fishes it can only serve also serve for protecting biodiversity so there are lots of co-benefits and we should see the whole picture and as professor Duarte mentioned we should move away from the carbon-centric view but to encompass all the benefits that nature provides for us natural capital provides for us and vegetated coastal ecosystems have both for carbon sequestration but also for maintenance and preservation of biodiversity I thank my remaining panelists again thank you very much for participating and I would like to thank you for also participating in this event and for asking questions and I wish all of us a very successful COP conference goodbye thank you very much