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The Women of Blue Carbon

Barbora Adamková, Tiina Kurvits, Steven Lutz, Jill Raval

By Blue Forests Project

March 21^st, 2017

19 March 1911, marked the first International Women’s Day where over one million women and men demanded equal rights for women to vote and hold public office without discrimination on the job. During the years of World War I, celebration of this day had been in a form of a protest against the war and the violence. This topic hit a milestone and achieved global awareness when the United Nations, in 1975, officially designated March 8 as International Women’s Day.

In many parts of the world, men and women are now considered equal, with the same rights in most social, economic and political spheres. But in the field of science and technology, there are still major gaps and barriers for women especially in the engineering field. According to the National Science Foundation’s survey conducted in 2014, over thirty thousand engineering degrees have been awarded in the USA to men compared to just over four thousand to women. Statistics show more promise for the field of science, where the gap between degrees granted to men and women is only eight thousand.

Fortunately, many of these women work in the marine sciences. In the UN Environment/GEF Blue Forests Project, five of the nine project sites are led by women. These women are responsible for exploring the value of coastal blue carbon and related ecosystem services in Ecuador, Madagascar, Mozambique, the UAE and the USA.

Global distribution of the UN Environment/GEF Blue Forests Project sites.

As blue carbon is an emerging field, it has potential to promote new paradigms and opportunities to advance gender mainstreaming. At the local scale this includes women’s groups representing communities in the implementation of blue carbon projects, while at the international level it means women as leaders in blue carbon policy and science. To encourage young women to consider a career on the blue carbon path, this past March 8th the Women of Blue Carbon were celebrated and can be followed on Twitter under the hashtag: #WomenofBlueCarbon. So far in 2017 the following women were profiled, representing a wide range of leadership in the field of blue carbon, from the community engagement to international discussions, from science to policy to management:

Photo Credit: Jason Valdez (background image); Amchamabudhabi.org; Rob Barnes; Steven Lutz.

H.E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak is the Secretary General of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi and Managing Director of the Emirates Wildlife Society. She is a leading voice for blue carbon within the UAE and around the world. Her support of the Abu Dhabi Blue Carbon Demonstration Project has led the UAE to incorporate the value of blue carbon at multiple levels, including municipal planning for the city of Abu Dhabi, Emirate and national climate planning, and the UAE’s international pledge on climate change (UAE submission to the UNFCCC). For her thoughts on the Emirate-scale project, please see the project review video. The Abu Dhabi project is a project site of the Blue Forests Project.

Montserrat Alban is the Environmental Service Manager for Conservation International Ecuador and leads the Ecuador project site of Blue Forests Project. She works with communities in the Gulf of Guayaquil exploring how the value of mangrove ecosystem services, such as the local red swamp crab fishery, can be harnessed for sustainable management. For more information, please see the following two stories: Blue Forests’ mascots: The red swamp crab and Women That Protect Trees.

Lalao Aigrette supervises the Tahiry Honko project for Blue Ventures in Madagascar. This project is a community-led mangrove carbon initiative that preserves mangroves for sustainable use for future generations, including reforestation, carbon monitoring and education of youth and adults. Lalao’s work includes the measurement of mangrove carbon stocks and community engagement. She is a leading spokesperson for community-based mangrove conservation and presented at COP21 in Paris in December 2015 on behalf of the Blue Forests Project. For more information about the project, please see the Blue Ventures’ video: Tahiry Honko - a community mangrove carbon project.

Photo Credits: Jason Valdez (background image); Centerfortheblueeconomy.org; Rob Barnes; Rob Barnes.

Sylvia Earle is a former chief scientist of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) in the United States and a world renowned oceanographer, research scientist, explorer and advocate for the oceans. She is the founder and a president of Mission Blue, a founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, and a National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence. Sylvia’s advocacy has included support for both coastal and oceanic blue carbon and she authored the preface for the 2014 Fish Carbon: Exploring Marine Vertebrate Carbon Services report.

Mona Edvardsen is the Finance and Project Controller for GRD-Arendal and is the chief finance officer for the Blue Forests Project, which is currently the world's largest blue carbon initiative. This project would not be possible without the financial diligence and oversight on all the blue carbon-related sub-contracts and funding from UN Environment and the GEF that Mona provides. Blue carbon is not just about field work; there are always many people playing indispensable roles behind the scenes.

Leah Glass manages the Blue Forests initiative of Blue Ventures and leads the project site for the Blue Forests Project in Madagascar. Working as Global Strategic Lead for Mangrove Conservation, she is helping others to replicate Blue Ventures’ community-focused mangrove blue carbon conservation approaches. Leah’s interests include satellite image processing, remote sensing and the application of satellite data to conservation. She contributed a chapter on coastal carbon to the Atlas of Ocean Wealth and recently published Madagascar’s Mangroves: Quantifying Nation-Wide and Ecosystem Specific Dynamics in the journal Remote Sensing.

Photo Credits: Jason Valdez (background image); IISD; STFC; Rob Barnes.

Jane Glavan is the Partnership Project Manager for the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI). Jane led the implementation of the Abu Dhabi Blue Carbon Demonstration Project for AGEDI, which successfully explored the value of blue carbon for seagrasses, mangrove and salt marshes in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The project was the first of its kind and helped to create the necessary science and data management tools for the better understanding and future preservation of blue carbon habitats. The project led to a national-scale assessment of blue carbon and the inclusion of blue carbon language in the UAE’s international pledge on climate change (UAE submission to the UNFCCC). Jane also manages the Blue Forests Project in the UAE. For more information, see the Abu Dhabi project, Blue Carbon Project Phase II and the Building Blue Carbon Projects: An Introductory Guide report.

Hilary Kennedy is a professor in Chemical Oceanography at Bangor University. She is a leading seagrass carbon scientist and a member of the Blue Carbon Initiative Scientific Working Group. She is also the lead author of the Coastal Wetlands chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Wetlands 2013 Supplement, which provides guidance on estimating and reporting anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals from managed coastal wetlands.

Angela Martin is the Project Lead for Blue Climate Solutions (BCS), a project of The Ocean Foundation. It is currently the world’s only non-governmental organization solely focused on blue carbon. BCS has a strong history advancing blue carbon with the US government and at the UNFCCC. It also formed the first international coalition in support of blue carbon policy: the Blue Climate Coalition. Angela’s work focuses on blue carbon education and advocacy, project management and fundraising. She is also a contributor to Women4Oceans, an NGO with the mandate to support, promote and represent the important work of women in improving ocean health. Angela represents BCS in the Blue Forests Project, and is the co-author of Fish Carbon: Exploring Marine Vertebrate Carbon Services and lead author of Blue Carbon - Nationally Determined Contributions Inventory.

Photo Credits: Jason Valdez (background image); IISD; Barbora Adamkova.

Kushla Munro is the Assistant Secretary of the International Branch of the International Climate Change and Energy Innovation Division for the Australian Department of the Environment and Energy. Her work entails policy on carbon markets, transparency and accounting and managing the International Partnership for Blue Carbon. Kushia highlighted the role of blue carbon at the UNFCCC COP22 in Marrakesh, Kushla presented the role of blue carbon in addressing climate change, stressing that the vital blue carbon functions have been scientifically proven, but their incorporation into policies and frameworks is lagging. For more information, see the IISD report on the COP 22 side event: Incorporating Blue Carbon into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.

Maria Potouroglou is a Project Assistant at GRID-Arendal and works on the Blue Solutions, Norwegian Blue Forests Network (NBFN) and ResponSEAble projects. She has recently finished her PhD at Edinburgh Napier University, focusing on seagrass carbon research. Maria recently presented on Scotland’s Coastal Blues: The Carbon Storage Capacity of Intertidal Zostera Meadows at the ASLO 2017 conference in Hawaii. Under the NBFN, she will be exploring seagrass carbon in Norway. Maria is also coordinating SeagraSeDy (Seagrasses and Sediment Dynamics), a group of scientists around the world measuring sedimentation processes, whose goal is to model coastal ecosystem vulnerability.

The unique perspectives and experience that these women bring to the field of blue carbon, as well as the many other women working on the topic who are not in this article but also deserve recognition, cannot be underestimated and we hope that #WomenofBlueCarbon is just the beginning of a story which will be told to inspire young women to choose the marine sciences and the exciting field of blue carbon.