The Abu Dhabi Blue Carbon Demonstration Project

Proactive action for Blue Carbon

One of the underlying perspectives of Abu Dhabi’s Blue Carbon Policy is the desire for proactive engagement around recent international initiatives regarding Blue Carbon. Many such initiatives are underway and form an essential backdrop to the development of Abu Dhabi Blue Carbon Policy. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Blue Carbon Initiative is an important international initiative with which EAD is collaborating closely. Through the Global Environment Facility (GEF), UNEP is expected to manage the largest investment in Blue Carbon to date and Abu Dhabi is a major partner on the programme. In fact, Abu Dhabi is one of the ‘pilot projects’ under the GEF ‘Blue Forest’ project and many of the tools, science and policies developed for Abu Dhabi will be used to guide other projects around the world, specifically in Madagascar, Mozambique, Indonesia and Ecuador. Also, the Blue Carbon Initiative was launched in 2010 at UNFCCC COP-16 with a focus on maintaining the capacity of coastal ecosystems to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and ocean while avoiding emissions from their destruction and degradation. The Initiative is a collaborative effort led by Conservation International (CI), the International Union for the Conservation

of Nature (IUCN), and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). There have also been a number of other prominent initiatives that have begun to urge action regarding the accounting of Blue Carbon within formal policy processes. At the international level, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) at the May 2012 meeting of the UNFCCC’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA) urged that sufficient time be dedicated to discussing “emissions and removals from coastal and marine ecosystems such as mangroves, tidal salt marshes, and seagrass meadows,” and that it should be considered a formal research theme in the future. They also requested that SBSTA invite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to start a work program “aimed at quantifying the role of coastal marine ecosystems on global atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases.” The formulation of a Blue Carbon policy, with its new opportunities for information management, sustainable management, international collaboration and local awareness-raising, provides an ideal framework to move the Blue Carbon agenda forward.

© AGEDI / Rob Barnes

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