Blue carbon: The potential of coastal and oceanic climate action
Created 53 days ago
by
Juyoung Yang
- Seaweed
- Climate Resilience
- Blue Economy
Nature-based climate solutions in the world's oceans can play an important role in conservation and carbon abatement efforts worldwide.
Assessing blue carbon solutions
McKinsey’s new report,Blue Carbon: The potential of coastal and economic climate action, sizes blue carbon NBS and measures their impacts, costs, and likely access to future funding. It highlights the latest scientific research and leverages McKinsey analysis to estimate abatement or conservation potential on a 2050 timeline. Deep dives on kelp reforestation and bottom trawling show how economies of scale in these emerging solutions could help reduce costs.
If fully implemented, the established class of solutions would offer 0.4 to 1.2 metric gigatons (Gt) of annual CO2 abatement, or between 1 and 3 percent of total current annual emissions (Exhibit 1). That potential jumps to approximately 3 GtCO2 of annual abatement (about 7 percent of total current annual emissions) if the solutions in the emerging category, such as large-scale seaweed farming and bottom-trawling management, were to be fully confirmed and implemented. Nascent solutions might add another 1 to 2 GtCO2 of annual abatement potential in the longer term, but the science remains highly uncertain. To put these numbers into context, annual human emissions are currently around 40 GtCO2.
Please visit the website to read the full article:
McKinsey & Company (Julien Claes, Duko Hopman, Gualtiero Jaeger, and Matt Rogers), 2022, Blue carbon: The potential of coastal and oceanic climate action, available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/blue-carbon-the-potential-of-coastal-and-oceanic-climate-action
Blog » Blue carbon: The potential of coastal and oceanic climate action
Blue carbon: The potential of coastal and oceanic climate action
Nature-based climate solutions in the world's oceans can play an important role in conservation and carbon abatement efforts worldwide.
Assessing blue carbon solutions
McKinsey’s new report,Blue Carbon: The potential of coastal and economic climate action, sizes blue carbon NBS and measures their impacts, costs, and likely access to future funding. It highlights the latest scientific research and leverages McKinsey analysis to estimate abatement or conservation potential on a 2050 timeline. Deep dives on kelp reforestation and bottom trawling show how economies of scale in these emerging solutions could help reduce costs.
If fully implemented, the established class of solutions would offer 0.4 to 1.2 metric gigatons (Gt) of annual CO2 abatement, or between 1 and 3 percent of total current annual emissions (Exhibit 1). That potential jumps to approximately 3 GtCO2 of annual abatement (about 7 percent of total current annual emissions) if the solutions in the emerging category, such as large-scale seaweed farming and bottom-trawling management, were to be fully confirmed and implemented. Nascent solutions might add another 1 to 2 GtCO2 of annual abatement potential in the longer term, but the science remains highly uncertain. To put these numbers into context, annual human emissions are currently around 40 GtCO2.
Please visit the website to read the full article:
McKinsey & Company (Julien Claes, Duko Hopman, Gualtiero Jaeger, and Matt Rogers), 2022, Blue carbon: The potential of coastal and oceanic climate action, available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/blue-carbon-the-potential-of-coastal-and-oceanic-climate-action