Blue Carbon: The Meadows Beneath the Waves

Seagrass meadows store carbon faster than forests and shelter a quarter of coastal fisheries — yet they are among the least mapped ecosystems on Earth.

An ecosystem you have to dive to see

Seagrass meadows cover a fraction of the ocean floor but bury carbon up to thirty-five times faster than tropical rainforest. They are also disappearing at roughly seven per cent a year — the fastest decline of any coastal ecosystem.

Drag the divider: satellite imagery on the left, the atlas classification on the right. The shallow shelf that reads as pale blue in the imagery resolves into distinct marine functional groups — meadows, reefs and rocky bottoms.

Reefs and meadows, side by side

Across the Indonesian archipelago the two most valuable shallow-water groups interleave: coral reef on the exposed edges, seagrass in the sheltered lagoons behind them. One protects the other from the swell.

Subtidal rocky reef

Counting what we cannot see

Because seagrass sits just below the surface, satellite classification is hard and ground truth is scarce. Every improvement in the atlas here is a direct improvement in the world’s blue-carbon accounting.