Goals

The overall objective of sea4soCiety is to improve competence for the assessment of potential and feasibility, risks, and societal acceptance, as well as interactions with other ecosystem services and sustainability goals, for sequestration and storage of “blue carbon” by coastal ecosystems in Germany and worldwide.

Specifically, this includes the following objectives:

• Quantifying storage capacities for “blue carbon” in four coastal ecosystem types and comparing them with “blue carbon” depots in unvegetated marine sediments
• Analyzing the origin and stability of organic matter stores, as well as their dynamics on the German North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, the Colombian Caribbean coasts, and the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts of Malaysia
• Quantifying the aboveground biomass of vegetation in the study areas, and identifying currently unvegetated coastal regions that would be suitable for assisted expansion of coastal ecosystems (ecosystem -design) by means of remote sensing
• Developing evidence- and scenario-based recommendations for policymakers and decision-makers, and upscaling to levels of national, international, and global relevance, based on local field research
• Designing new governance systems using innovative and participatory approaches that address local needs for ecosystem services in addition to mitigating climate change through “blue carbon” sequestration
• Identifying potential synergies and trade-offs in greenhouse gas storage and sequestration initiatives from a regional development perspective, in line with the United Nations SDGs, the German Sustainable Development Strategy, and the German Climate Change Program
• Creating a roadmap for the sustainable use of marine carbon storage in combination with the development of national competencies in the field of atmospheric CO₂ extraction (carbon dioxide removal, CDR)