Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The goal of the Seaweed Carbon Farming Project is to quantify the sequestration of macroalgal carbon below seaweed farms and create a new blue carbon market. Advancing the understanding of seaweed farming‚ contribution to mitigating climate change will enhance its social license, spur regulatory support and private sector investment, bring additional revenue to farmers, and create the basis for optimizing farms for carbon. Creating these enabling conditions to scale up seaweed farming will help to restore the ocean, develop the potential to remove gigaton-scale atmospheric CO2, and create a new blue economy to help regeneratively feed and power the world.

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Though seaweed aquaculture is a $6 billion industry(2), historically it has been an industry of the poor, with virtually all of the farmed biomass produced in low margin cultivation businesses in Asia, and end consumption for low value applications. Seaweed farming is a low barrier to entry revenue generating opportunity for anyone with access to the ocean, and as such is accessible to coastal communities, subsistence fishers, women, and indigenous people. The climate justice potential of seaweed farming is a core reason why we chose scaling up seaweed farming as our first strategy. While seaweed farming must reach industrial scale to realize its potential as a climate and ocean restoration solution, a focus entirely on offshore exploitation neglects the sector‚ potential to advance blue economy jobs, gender equity, local fisheries restoration, food security and coastal resilience in both developing and developed nations. Oceans 2050 envisions a market in which both offshore and artisanal scale seaweed farming coexist, producing a variety of products and social and environmental services. 

While quantified social and economic benefits for the seaweed industry are not widely published, the World Bank estimates that per 500,000 km2 of ocean area utilized for seaweed farming, there is potential for 50 million direct and 50 million indirect jobs and 50 million tons of protein for people and animals(3). Seaweed farming offers an opportunity to small island nations without an intensive industrial sector to decarbonize their economies as part of their National Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, and/or to obtain revenue via global carbon markets. 

All participating farmers in our Project are in coastal communities, and of the 23,083 farmers reported by our partner farms, 22,939 (99%) are people of color. Sixty percent of our participating farms are located in Asia, 10% in South America, and 5% in Africa, with 35% of our farms located in OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Official Development Assistance (ODA) eligible countries, including Least Developed Countries. 

Community-scale seaweed farming is a platform for many women to improve their economic livelihood. In emerging markets, women often are responsible for all of the onshore activities associated with seaweed farming, as well as in some cases planting and harvesting. Our partner farms in Madagascar are farmed by entire households, with 686 of the total 1,616 households headed by women. In Zanzibar, over 80% of seaweed farmers are women and, in Southeast Asia, women seaweed farmers are often equally involved in decision making and activities. A study in Indonesia showed increased income of 5-10% for female seaweed farmers(4). 40% of the scientists (excluding the laboratories, and including a number of lead scientists) on the Project are female, and Oceans 2050‚ leadership team is 50% female (including the President).

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