Coun­ter­act­ing cli­mate change: Re­search con­sor­tium sea4so­Ci­ety in­vest­ig­ates ways to nat­ur­ally in­crease car­bon stor­age in coastal eco­sys­tems

As one of a total of six re­search con­sor­tia in the mis­sion "Mar­ine car­bon sinks in de­car­bon­iz­a­tion path­ways", sea4soCiety will bring to­gether al­most 40 sci­ent­ists from nine north­ern Ger­man uni­versit­ies and re­search in­sti­tutes. Over the course of the three-year fund­ing phase they will quantify and ana­lyse the stor­age ca­pa­city for "blue car­bon" in four dif­fer­ent types of coastal eco­sys­tems on the Ger­man North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, in the Carib­bean and the In­done­sian Sea. Mar­tin Zi­m­mer, Head of the De­part­ment of Eco­logy at ZMT and Pro­fessor of Man­grove Eco­logy at the University of Bremen, is re­spons­ible for co­ordin­at­ing the re­search pro­ject.

Ve­get­a­tion-rich coastal eco­sys­tems of trop­ical and tem­per­ate lat­it­udes, such as man­grove forests, seagrass beds, salt marshes or kelp forests, ab­sorb huge amounts of car­bon di­ox­ide (CO₂) from the at­mo­sphere. Man­grove forests in trop­ical re­gions alone ab­sorb 40 to 60 mil­lion tonnes of car­bon an­nu­ally. That is about as much as road traffic in Ger­many emits as green­house gases per year. The salt marshes of the Wad­den Sea on the Ger­man North Sea coast store about 20,000 tonnes of car­bon an­nu­ally. The stor­age of this so-called "blue car­bon" is one of the most im­port­ant ser­vices provided by coastal eco­sys­tems.

The re­search­ers will con­trib­ute sci­entific ex­pert­ise in coastal eco­logy, chem­istry, sed­i­mento­logy, geo­logy, hy­dro­dynam­ics, re­mote sens­ing and mod­el­ling to quantify the stor­age ca­pa­city of "blue car­bon" in seagrass beds, al­gae, salt marshes and man­grove forests and com­pare it with the de­pots of or­ganic ma­ter­ial in un­ve­get­ated mar­ine sed­i­ments.

The ori­gin, sta­bil­ity and dy­nam­ics of or­ganic mat­ter are ana­lysed in the field and in the labor­at­or­ies of the col­lab­or­at­ive part­ners. “We ana­lyze which or­ganic com­pounds spe­cific­ally make up this 'blue car­bon'. This will help us bet­ter un­der­stand why there are dif­fer­ences in sta­bil­ity and dy­nam­ics,” says Dr. Manuel Liebeke of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology.

Satel­lite data and ship-based meas­ure­ments are used to de­term­ine the bio­mass on land and un­der­wa­ter in coastal zones. Com­mu­nic­a­tion with local so­ci­et­ies, mod­el­ling and scen­arios will make an eval­u­ation of the po­ten­tial be­ne­fits and risks of in­creas­ing the area of coastal eco­sys­tems bey­ond their cur­rent stocks pos­sible.

“By char­ac­ter­ising hab­itat con­di­tions of coastal ve­get­ated eco­sys­tems, we can identify un­ve­get­ated coastal stretches that would be suit­able for either ex­pand­ing or cre­at­ing new coastal eco­sys­tems,” says Zi­m­mer. “Eco­sys­tem design, i.e. the tar­geted im­ple­ment­a­tion of eco­sys­tems for the res­tor­a­tion of eco­sys­tem ser­vices, plays a cent­ral role in our ap­proach to for­mu­lat­ing re­com­mend­a­tions for the fu­ture man­age­ment of coastal eco­sys­tems.”

Socio-ecological component of the joint project

Ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers, suit­able meas­ures should be eco­lo­gic­ally feas­ible, en­vir­on­ment­ally com­pat­ible and leg­ally and eth­ic­ally un­ob­jec­tion­able. Nat­ural sci­ent­ists are work­ing closely to­gether with re­search­ers from the fields of hu­man geo­graphy, so­cio-eco­nom­ics, eth­ics and law in an in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary net­work to en­sure that the ap­proaches to im­prov­ing car­bon stor­age in coastal eco­sys­tems meet so­ci­etal re­quire­ments, cre­ate ad­di­tional be­ne­fits and are based on broad ac­cept­ance.

• Professor Dr Martin Zimmer (coordinator), Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen
• Professor Dr Kai Bischof, Faculty 2 Biology/Chemistry, University of Bremen
• Dr Annette Breckwoldt, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen
• Professor Dr Thorsten Dittmar, Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM), Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
• Dr Mar Fernandez-Mendez, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven
• Professor Dr Jan-Hendrik Hehemann, MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen
• Professor Dr Kai Jensen, Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), University of Hamburg
• Dr David Keller, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
• Dr Ketil Koops-Jakobsen, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Sylt
• Dr Manuel Liebeke, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen
• Professor Dr Nele Matz-Lück, Kiel Marine Science, Kiel University (CAU)
• Dr Peter Müller, University of Hamburg
• Professor Dr Natascha Oppelt, Kiel Marine Science, Kiel University (CAU)
• Dr Maike Paul, Leibniz University Hanover
• Professor Dr Beate Ratter, Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), University of Hamburg
• Professor Dr Katrin Rehdanz, Kiel Marine Science, Kiel University (CAU)
• Dr. Jens Schneider von Deimling, Kiel Marine Science, Kiel University (CAU)
• Dr Joscha Schmiedt, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen
• Dr Michael Seidel, Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM), Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
• Professor Dr Klaus Wallmann, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel

In the research mission “Marine carbon sinks in decarbonization pathways” – in short: CDRmare – of the Ger­man Mar­ine Re­search Al­li­ance (DAM), about 200 sci­ent­ists in six col­lab­or­at­ive re­search con­sor­tia are in­vest­ig­at­ing, how and to what ex­tent the ocean can play a sus­tain­able role in the re­moval and stor­age of car­bon di­ox­ide from the at­mo­sphere. The long-term goal is to de­velop a roadmap for the act­ive use of mar­ine car­bon sinks in or­der to con­trib­ute to the mit­ig­a­tion of the im­pacts of an­thro­po­genic cli­mate change and to help achieve the Paris cli­mate goals. CDRmare (CDR = Car­bon Diox­ide Removal) is co­ordin­ated at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde. Ger­many's Federal Ministry of Education and Research is fund­ing the re­search mis­sion with 27 mil­lion euros over an ini­tial phase of three years (1.8.2021 - 31.7.2024). Fur­ther in­form­a­tion: www.cdrmare.de/en

The German Marine Research Alliance and its 22 mem­ber in­sti­tu­tions de­velop solu­tions-ori­ented know­ledge and po­ten­tial courses of ac­tion for the sus­tain­able use of coasts, seas and oceans.