Blue Carbon Ecosystems Workshop
Details
Note: Yale School of the Environment (YSE) was formerly known as the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). News articles and events posted prior to July 1, 2020, refer to the School's name at that time.
Summary
The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) is conducting a Blue Carbon Ecosystems Workshop on October 21, 2024 at the Yale School of the Environment.
Conserving and restoring mangroves and other “blue carbon ecosystems” (i.e., tidal marshes and seagrass beds) have emerged as an important focus of international climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Though much smaller in spatial extent than terrestrial forests, these ecosystems sequester carbon at a much faster rate and can bury large quantities of carbon in sediment for thousands of years. Moreover, they provide a wide variety of other ecosystem services, including buffering tidal surges, serving as nurseries for fisheries, and providing an array of nontimber forest products, which are directly beneficial to local coastal communities in adjusting to the vagaries of climate change.
Content
ELTI is working to build the capacity of stakeholders to conserve and restore these ecosystems through its training and other capacity development initiatives. Specifically, ELTI’s Indonesia Program, which is implemented in conjunction with Blue Forests (Yayasan Hutan Biru), is expanding its course offerings on mangroves and blue carbon, while also supporting Blue Forests and others to establish a mangrove-oriented training landscape, complete with a fully developed curriculum and series of demonstration sites in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. ELTI’s focus on Indonesia reflects the fact that Indonesia is home to over 20% of the world’s mangroves and the Indonesian government has set aggressive restoration targets. Meanwhile, the ELTI Online Program based in New Haven is also currently developing a 5-week online course on Mangrove Restoration and Blue Carbon for a global audience of practitioners.
This workshop will bring together Blue Forests team members, the YSE community, and a few external scholars with thematic expertise to share research and training experiences and discuss potential collaborations in person. ELTI sees great potential in scaling up Yale’s work on blue carbon ecosystems and is envisioning using this workshop as an incubator to develop a proposal which we intend to submit to the Yale Planetary Solutions Seed Grant Program in 2025. Additionally, ELTI will use this workshop to solicit input on the design of the global Mangrove Restoration and Blue Carbon course, including a review of the course content and recommendations of course instructors and resource people.