This week, Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts and a candidate for US president, issued a Blue New Deal for Our Oceans that strongly features ‘blue carbon’.
Through initiatives such as the UN Environment Blue Forests Project, GRID-Arendal has long worked on blue carbon, a strategic approach to protecting ocean ecosystems as a way of fighting climate change, but blue carbon has not gotten a lot of high-profile attention – until now. Warren’s proposal is the first of its kind in the 2020 US presidential race, and it comes at the same time that blue carbon is getting unprecedented attention at the UN Climate Conference now taking place in Madrid.
Warren's oceans plan focusses on a variety of coastal and marine issues, including sustainable ocean-based jobs (the ‘blue economy’), renewable energy, maritime food security, marine protected areas, and, notably, how the US government can play a role in both climate change adaptation and mitigation through ocean conservation and regeneration.
Warren specifically calls for establishing a national blue carbon programme and ensuring funding for blue carbon research. From her plan:
‘It’s the first policy plan in the 2020 presidential field to focus explicitly on the role government can play in both reducing the impacts of climate change on oceans and using oceans as a tool to fight the crisis’, reports the news site Grist. And it shows ‘politicans are increasingly taking cues from scientists as they build out their climate agendas’.
(Photograph by Tom Lohdan, Creative Commons license)
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