GCRF Funding Cycle
2018-19
Principal Investigator
William Austin
Schools
Geography & Sustainable Development
ODA countries
India
Blue Carbon resources offer the potential to become incorporated into frameworks for the implementation of sustainable development goals and to help meet the challenges of the current global climate emergency. The frameworks of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, allow the inclusion of Blue Carbon resources in national Greenhouse Gas (GHG) accounting if coastal wetlands are appropriately managed and restored as net sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide. One important type of coastal environment that is at risk are mangrove ecosystems. These vegetated coastal habitats occur at the transition between land and sea, where they form a natural defence against the encroaching sea.
The INCAR project addresses an important dimension of the ecosystem function of mangroves, namely their potential to contribute as a largely unknown Blue Carbon resource in India. This project is actively exploring this additional ecosystem service as an important policy-relevant factor for their conservation, restoration and regeneration under increasing human and climatic pressures. INCAR is contributing to the knowledge base that will yield alternative management practices for mangrove forests and, through the recognition of historical climate debt and the need for action beyond meeting national GHG targets for net zero emissions, to an outward-looking policy agenda from Scotland and the UK.