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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.
