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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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