Deloitte has teamed up with Climate Impact Partners for a program to fund U.K seagrass recovery and unlock long-term finance to save and reinstate vital seagrass meadows.
The program, in collaboration with Project Seagrass and the National Oceanography Centre, will fund critical research across seagrass meadows around the U.K, mapping the ecosystems and developing methods to restore them at scale.
It will also look to address the barriers that prevent finance flowing to seagrass restoration, including improving the scientific knowledge of carbon sequestration, piloting new techniques for seagrass propagation and engaging communities in meadow restoration.
Climate Impact Partners’ head of product innovation, Kirsty Schneeberger said seagrass is a “powerhouse plant”, which plays a vital role in protecting marine eco-systems in an interview.
Schneeberger said this includes helping combat ocean acidification, protecting corals against bleaching, and also “really packs a punch in terms of sequestering carbon”.
She told me one of the project’s aims is to gather and analyse more data about how much carbon seagrass is storing and its sequestration rates.
Schneeberger said previous studies have shown seagrass can sequester carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical forests.
She added seagrass also creates a very stable root network, which holds carbon for a very long time.
“By capturing carbon, holding it in its root network, seagrass can also prevent other adverse impacts that we are seeing from climate change, such as helping to prevent against coastal erosion and storm surges,” she explained.
She said the ultimate aim of the project is also to look to address the barriers that prevent projects like this from getting more private sector funding.
Schneeberger added this could be done by using results from the project to develop a seagrass carbon code. Improving the data and understanding of carbon sequestration rates of seagrass can help build the foundations to quantify the carbon benefits.
She said this would underpin the process to generate carbon credits as part of the voluntary carbon market.
And added unlocking this type of carbon finance is vital to achieving global Net Zero goals, especially for ocean projects given Life Below Water is the least funded of all the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) currently.
This program forms a key part of Deloitte’s Beyond Value Chain Mitigation (BVCM) activities.
Deloitte will be using skills, influence and targeted investment to catalyze environmental and social impact across the energy transition, circularity, sustainable food systems and nature restoration.
Chief sustainability officer of Deloitte U.K and North & South Europe, Smruti Naik-Jones, said the seagrass program will help unlock a “powerful tool in the fight against the climate crisis” in a statement.
In coordination with Project Seagrass, a team of volunteers from Deloitte and Climate Impact Partners helped harvest seedlings from a healthy seagrass meadow for the recovery program.
“Seagrass meadows are the powerhouses of coastal seas providing a nature-based solution to climate change, said Dr Claire Evans, from the U.K’s National Oceanography Centre in a statement.
“They have been neglected for decades, which has led to their large-scale degradation and loss. This program exemplifies how we can turn that loss into an opportunity for environmental renewal through large-scale restoration.”
