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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.

Proactive action for Blue Carbon

© AGEDI / Rob Barnes

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