Exchanges on Blue Carbon

The GMA Policy Working Group

The Global Mangrove Alliance (GMA) unites more than 100 member organizations across 40+ countries around its 2030 goals: halting mangrove loss, restoring half of all degraded mangroves, and doubling protection of what remains. The GMA’s Policy Working Group (PWG), connecting over 40 member organizations and all 14 national chapters, advances the enabling policy frameworks these goals require, from local governance to international agreements.

https://youtu.be/qQTfrAExMuQ

In August 2026, the PWG held its second peer-learning call of the year, bringing members together to focus on blue carbon policy and finance, one of the topics members identified as a priority in last year's survey. Building on the group's first call in March, which launched the 2026 work program, this session moved from introductions into substance: an anchor presentation on blue carbon financing and project development, diverse country- and subnational-level case studies from PWG members, and an open exchange on the policy and governance conditions that determine whether blue carbon ambition translates into action on the ground.

The call opened with a presentation from Lisa Schindler Murray of Rare, who leads the organization's blue carbon and nature-based financing work. She walked through the full landscape of blue carbon financing, carbon markets and the wide range of non-carbon market instruments now emerging, including payment for ecosystem services, parametric insurance, outcome-based finance, and enterprise-based approaches, and stressed that each depends on distinct enabling policy conditions, from tenure and resource-use rights to government engagement. She closed by highlighting two tools worth knowing: the High-Quality Blue Carbon Practitioners' Guide, recently updated to its second edition and organized around five pillars (safeguarding nature, empowering people, employing the best information, operating locally and contextually, and mobilizing high-integrity capital), and the new Blue Carbon Cost Tool from TNC and partners, which helps project developers estimate full costs from the outset.

Her key takeaways for the group: 

• No single financing tool is sufficient on its own, so a resilient strategy draws on several;

• Local leadership and context, ecology, policy, community priorities, and risk tolerance, should drive which tools get used

• Existing project support tools are there to be learned from rather than reinvented

• Local action, protecting one mangrove and empowering one community at a time, adds up to a planetary-scale response to climate and biodiversity loss.

Three brief case studies followed, offering a snapshot of blue carbon policy in practice. In Jamaica, more than two years of work by The Nature Conservancy with Pew Charitable Trusts and the University of the West Indies, combining legislative review, strengthened baseline science, and stakeholder engagement, helped secure stronger blue carbon commitments in the country's latest NDC, including targets to protect 67% of the island's mangroves by 2033 and restore 7,000 hectares by 2027. In Papua New Guinea, The Nature Conservancy and partners supported a new blue carbon policy roadmap, launched at COP30, that clarifies institutional roles across government and names communities as key stakeholders and implementers alongside financing mechanisms, with a full policy targeted for 2030. And in São Paulo State, Brazil, Fundação Florestal, working with the University of São Paulo, has built a subnational blue carbon inventory on soil carbon sampling, now covering more than 2,000 samples, creating an internationally aligned baseline ahead of any future market project, alongside a new payment-for-ecosystem-services initiative addressing an invasive oyster species harming local mangroves and fishing communities.

The discussion that followed surfaced themes cutting across all three presentations. Several members pointed to the same underlying policy conditions, tenure clarity, data-sharing rules, and early government engagement, as prerequisites regardless of financing instrument. On the gap between frameworks and practice, members highlighted the lack of guidance on free, prior, and informed consent and rights-based community engagement in voluntary blue carbon projects, noting several existing tools to support carbon market standards. Members also touched on how blue carbon commitments increasingly align with broader climate and biodiversity frameworks, including NDCs, national biodiversity strategies, and 30x30 targets, reinforcing blue carbon's role as a bridge among climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity, and community livelihoods.

The PWG's next peer-learning call is planned for Q3 2026. In the meantime, catch up on the group's first peer-learning call of the year or watch the recording of this session on YouTube.

Interested in learning more? Dive into the recent PWG publication, Mangrove Law and Policy in Practice: 2026 Case Studies, building on the 2023 Mangrove Law and Policy Brief. Developed collaboratively by PWG members and partners around the world, it brings together 16 case studies across restoration protocols, NDCs, blue carbon tools, biodiversity strategies, and governance frameworks, offering practical guidance for translating commitments into outcomes on the ground.

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If you are a GMA member working on mangrove policy and are not yet part of the Policy Working Group, reach out to the PWG lead, Adriana Vidal (Adriana.vidal@iucn.org), to get involved.