Building Blue Carbon Projects - An Introductory Guide

Engagement of the right experts and community stakeholders is important for making a determination of the potential for project success and to build capacity around Blue Carbon projects

2.2 Institutional Considerations

For the implementation of Blue Carbon projects to be sustained and successful, it is important that there first be an enabling environment for adequate institutional coordination across appropriate governmental agencies and levels. However, achieving such an environment may be hampered by institutional barriers common to many countries, as summarized below: Legal frameworks for coastal management are typically incomplete and suffer from critical gaps : there may be several issues that are missing in a country's current legal framework to ensure the holistic and effective protection of Blue Carbon ecosystems (especially intertidal ecosystems). Laws, regulations and mandates may be inadequate or contradictory, resulting in a lack of clarity about the roles and responsibilities of individual agencies. Furthermore, many jurisdictions lack a comprehensive institutional framework for coastal protection and management that addresses the risks of climate change and marine pollution. Agencies responsible for coastal management often lack the technical capacity or necessary knowledge to implement Blue Carbon : Capacity building has to come first to overcome the gaps in knowledge and expertise. Such barriers can include inadequate information exchange among regional research centres and local governance councils, as well as a lack of national technical capacity to plan, implement, or monitor adaptation measures such as Blue Carbon projects. There are often no institutionalized mechanisms for managing potential conflicts among multiples users of coastal resources : There may also be a lack of awareness and understanding of coastal ecosystem benefits that affects community awareness of sustainable coastal management needs. In many settings there is a lack of formal way to include civil society perspectives on coastal and marine protection activities, which necessitates creating a method to build community awareness and civil capacity to support the projects over time. Overcoming the institutional barriers requires attention to regulatory, coordination, jurisdictional and technical capacity factors: Regulatory factors provide the basis for institutional action. It is likely that most countries have regulations in place specifically requiring that impacts on ecosystem services be considered during activities that affect the coast such as development (e.g., environmental impact statements). Such regulations may offer readily achievable targets for the incorporation of Blue Carbon values into policy and management. However, it is unlikely that many countries, if any, require an assessment of the economic value of ecosystem services in estimates of economic impact of projects that disrupt the delivery of those ecosystem services. Enacting a new regulatory requirement that calls for the explicit assessment of Blue Carbon ecosystems - as well as an assessment of the economic value of the environmental services they render - could profoundly influence actions based on existing pieces of legislation governing the protection and management of coastal habitats.

Building Blue Carbon Projects An Introductory Guide

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