Palau is focusing on delivering blue carbon projects, Palau Permanent Representative of the Republic of Palau to the United Nations Ilana Seid said in her remarks during the launch of a new report commissioned by the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy recently.
Ambassador Seid said some of the projects involved Palau and Taiwan agreeing to collaborate on marine research to study the blue carbon in the Pacific nation’s territorial water and explore its potential benefits.
Taiwan’s research vessel, the Legend was in Palau for a research cruise in July.
Seid also highlighted that Palau is working with a blue carbon fellow funded by the US State Department to research mangroves, specifically mangrove blue carbon.
“So he’s actually been there since, I think it’s been at least five years, so his research is quite advanced in terms of the blue carbon space specifically for mangroves, and he’s basically advanced in terms of the blue carbon space specifically for mangroves saying it’s kind of leading the way in terms of trying to develop blue carbon policy with respect to mangroves,” Seid stated.
Seid also reiterated Palau’s moratorium on deep-sea mining and bottom trawling in its territorial waters.
“ Because we are concerned that it might unearth a lot of this carbon that’s being stored. So that is a domestic policy that we’ve undertaken, and we’re also one of the countries at the International Seabed Authority that’s called for a moratorium on deep sea mining in the high seas, and that’s because we really believe that we need to take a science-based approach to this policy for mining the seabed.”
In 2019, the Ocean Panel commissioned an analysis that found that the ambitious implementation of ocean-based climate solutions in five sectors (ocean-based renewable energy, ocean-based transport, marine conservation and restoration; ocean-based food, and marine carbon capture and storage) had the potential to reduce the ‘emissions gap’ between current and future emissions by up to 21 percent on a 1.5°C pathway, and up to about 25 percent on a 2.0°C pathway, in 2050. (Island Times)