By Max Marcovitch
January 9, 2023
News spotlight: Could seaweed be our new big climate ally?
4 min
“Most of the world’s seaweed forests are not even mapped, much less monitored,” marine ecologist Karen Filbee-Dexter told the Guardian.
The implications could be significant.
Namely, Sherriff writes, the research helps scientists better understand the role kelp and other seaweed forests could play in stemming the climate crisis by absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide from seawater and the atmosphere.
Filbee-Dexter told the Guardian that the research was a “major step forward” in understanding seaweed’s role in mitigating climate change, “because it calculates the productivity – growth and carbon uptake – of the largest marine vegetated ecosystem.”
In addition to absorbing massive amounts of carbon, kelp forests play an important role in marine ecosystems. Scientists have found that as grey whales migrate from Mexico to Alaska they use massive curtains of kelp as a haven from killer whales. And, kelp could even be a boon to food security: The study finds that given its rapid growth, seaweed, if properly harvested, could become a “very sustainable and nutrient-dense food source.”
Filbee-Dexter told the Guardian she hopes that “more awareness about these [underwater] forests will lead to more protection and restoration.”
Working alongside local communities, governments, Indigenous peoples and ocean experts, the alliance has engaged in advancing the conservation of more than 4.8 million square kilometers (1.9 million square miles) of ocean across Fiji, Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and Tristan da Cunha — the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world. In each of these places, the alliance collaborates with communities and governments to identify their conservation goals and help implement strategies to achieve them.
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