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56
Building Blue Carbon Projects
An Introductory Guide
8.3
Building the Case for Blue Carbon in Madagascar
Covering
approximately
2,800
square
kilometres, Madagascar has Africa’s fourth
largest extent of mangrove ecosystems.
Mangroves provide critical goods and services
to
surrounding
Malagasy
communities
including a significant majority of the energy
needs for rural populations, primarily through
logging activities to obtain charcoal and
firewood. Despite the ecological benefits
provided by mangroves, in many parts of the
country degradation and rate of loss continues
to increase. Presently, any large-scale or
comprehensive management initiatives to
curb or reduce degradation and deforestation
are absent. Hence the dire need for innovative
approaches that can support sustainable
management, such as Blue Carbon.
Blue Ventures, a social enterprise with a
presence in Madagascar, has a proven record
of novel, holistic marine conservation
initiatives that directly improve livelihoods in
some of the world’s poorest coastal
communities. Blue Ventures has been
exploring Blue Carbon’s potential to promote
sustainable management since 2011. Through
their Blue Forests project, Blue Ventures has
been assessing the feasibility of and
developing forest carbon (or REDD+) and
other payments for ecosystem services
projects centred on the conservation and sustainable use of mangrove forests. These projects all
aim to build resilience to climate change, improve local livelihoods, safeguard biodiversity, and
help mitigate global climate change. Through the Blue Forests project, sixteen full-time staff are
currently engaged with communities across six sites along Madagascar’s west coast (Figure 12).
The team includes conservationists, field technicians, geospatial analysts, ecologists,
socioeconomic scientists, and community organizers.
A key aim of the Blue Forests project is to, in time, build community-led projects that will
empower coastal communities to equitably participate in mangrove REDD+. If such projects are to
be built, methodologies specific to mangroves are necessary. To accomplish this, the team has
spent much of 2013 working through a Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)-approved methodology for
avoided deforestation projects - a methodology developed for terrestrial forests. By working
through this approved methodology in its entirety, the project is making robust estimates of the
Figure 12
Blue Carbon project sites in Madagascar.
