Thirty-three experts, drawn from academia, project development and policy, consider how to develop Blue Carbon Ecosystem (BCE) conservation and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) without compromising local coastal communities’ livelihoods or social justice.

To achieve this, each expert was asked to develop ten key questions, which were distilled into ten themes and ranked in order of importance under three broad categories of people, policy & finance, and science & technology.

The study identifies some of the key issues and challenges facing communities, policy makers, managers and other stakeholders when considering the opportunities presented by NDCs to achieve effective and socially just BCE protection and restoration.

Contributor, Gabriel Grimsditch, is the current CMS Dugong MoU Programme Coordinator.

The online version of this article contains supplementary material.

Dencer-Brown, A.M. et. al, Integrating blue: How do we make nationally determined contributions work for both blue carbon and local coastal communities? Ambio (2022).