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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

25/11/23 12:00 PM IST

Mangroves as Carbon Sink

In News
  • As the annual COP-28 summit kicks off in Dubai, on a remote, cyclone-battered island in the Sundarbans, a schoolteacher has rallied climate crisis’s most vulnerable community —mothers — to secure a mangrove forest and, consequently, their lives.
Mangroves Forests
  • Historically, the Sundarbans, a complex network of islands set in the delta on the Bay of Bengal and spread across West Bengal and Bangladesh, has been battered by storm surge floods, cyclones, salinity intrusion, rising sea levels, land subsidence, water logging, coastal erosion and biodiversity loss.
  • Globally, carbon capture is being seen as one of the solutions to the climate crisis.
  • Blue carbon is a very important area of climate studies.
  • To reduce the impact of climate change, we have to increase the Blue Carbon Stock by planting mangroves in mudflat areas.
  • If the mangroves are removed from Chargheri and the forest area not protected, the carbon will be released in the atmosphere and the impact of climate change in the region will increase.
  • Evidence of anthropogenic climate change — that is, climate change resulting from human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation — is around us. Corrective measures have centred around cutting carbon emissions, but it is not happening fast enough.
  • Since 2009, when the term Blue Carbon was coined, researchers and other experts have become interested in the processes of carbon removal from the atmosphere as well
  • With carbon dioxide (CO2) responsible for most of the global heating, carbon particles are not only being released in extremely large quantities, they have the ability to linger in the earth’s atmosphere for hundreds of years and warm it.
  • Until the industrial revolution, the earth’s natural system had the capacity to maintain a stable level of atmospheric carbon.
  • Today, the search is for ways to remove the trapped carbon from the air in order to keep the earth’s temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees.
  • Among all the natural systems, after seagrass, mangroves are the most efficient carbon trapping systems.
  • The initiative’s advantage is the rapid carbon sequestration (capture) capacity of mangroves.
Benefits
  • Mangrove trees, which dominate the tidal belt, are particularly powerful in carbon capture.
  • They absorb carbon from the atmosphere and deposit it in the soil, where the carbon can remain for thousands of years if undisturbed.
  • Mangroves behave differently from other trees that also remove CO2 as part of the photosynthesis process — the latter store the carbon in their branches and roots but, when the tree dies, the carbon is released back into the air.
  • Mangroves, on the other hand, transfer the carbon to the soil, where it stays unaffected even if the tree is destroyed.
  • Researchers say that mangrove forests can remove 10 times more carbon from the air than other forests.
  • At CoP-27, held in Egypt last year, the Mangrove Alliance for Climate (MAC) was launched to unite countries, including India, “to scale up, accelerate conservation, restoration and growing plantation efforts of mangrove ecosystems for the benefit of communities globally, and recognise the importance of these ecosystems for climate change mitigation and adaption”.
  • In India, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented a new scheme in this year’s budget, called Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes (MISHTI), to protect and revive mangrove ecosystems on the Indian coast.
  • Several NGOs and individuals are planting thousands of mangroves in the Sunderbans.
Source- Indian Express

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