Abstract: To the climate change mitigation three blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs)- mangroves, sea grasses, meadows and salt marshes plays the important role by sequestrating blue carbon in their ecosystems. Mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrasses store more carbon per unit area than terrestrial forest such as tundra, taigas, deciduous forestland tropical rainforest. India is having nine coastal states and four coastal union territories, 7516.6 km coastline and total 2,305,143 sq km exclusive economic zone (EEZ) does not belong to the higher annual carbon sequestration potential countries. As total blue carbon wealth of India are generating from 4949 Sq km of mangroves , 193.09 Sq km of sea grasses and 301.5 Sq km of salt marshes but that is not equally distributed along the states and UTs as per their size of EEZs. This paper aims to present the status of different blue carbon ecosystem areas and their annual blue carbon sequestration potential states/UTs wise. Also we have shown here a management framework for the blue carbon wealth assessment and redistribution among the coastal states and UTs in India.
Keywords: Blue Carbon, Blue carbon wealth, Carbon Sequestration, Blue Carbon ecosystems (BCEs), Social cost of carbon (SCC), EEZ.
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DOI:
10.17148/IJARCCE.2022.11353
