How to mitigate and adapt to the ongoing climate change is perhaps the biggest challenge of our generation. Vegetated coastal habitats have the capacity to act as efficient carbon sinks (a hot topic within the climate debate today). There are, however, major knowledge gaps regarding their functioning and connectivity across broad landscapes and these factors need to be taken into consideration when estimating their mitigation potential.

In the Baltic Sea, no large-scale study of the carbon sequestration capacity of coastal vegetated habitats has been done. The Baltic Sea is naturally a vulnerable environment, while it is also heavily influenced by human activities which, together with the fact that the extent of vegetated coastal habitats in the Baltic Sea is unknown, results in large uncertainties when estimating the climate change mitigation capacity of coastal environments in the Baltic Sea.

My PhD project is part of the research project “Climate change mitigation capacity of the Baltic coastal seascape: identification of hotspot environments for coastal blue carbon sequestration and guidance for sustainable management of Baltic coastal landscapes under global change (CLIM-SCAPE)”, which aims to resolve some of these uncertainties. My focus within the project is on how the connectivity between coastal blue carbon habitats within the Baltic Sea region is linked to their climate change mitigation capacity.

Publications

Dahl M., Ismail RO., Braun S., Masqué P., Lavery P., Gullström M., Arias-Ortiz A., Asplund M.E., Garbaras A., Lyimo L.D., Mtolera M.S.P., Serrano O., Webster C., Björk M. (2022) Impacts of land-use change and urban development of carbon sequestration in tropical seagrass meadow sediment. Marine Environmental Research 176, 105608
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marenvres.2022.105608 External link, opens in new window.