Environmental Research Letters | March 14, 2023
A recent study conducted by a collaborative team from Indonesia, Japan, and Malaysia highlights the importance of mangrove forests in regulating climate change and carbon cycling. Mangrove forests are crucial in the Earth's carbon cycling and other biogeochemical processes in blue carbon ecosystems. However, there is a lack of concrete knowledge about carbon source and sink patterns, particularly in the Asia-Pacific (AP) region, which has a significant mangrove area of 68,493 km2. The study summarizes a ten-year inventory of carbon stocks and fluxes across 25 AP countries to understand the current knowledge and gaps in mangrove blue carbon research. The findings reveal that while carbon stock assessments of individual components exist for all 25 countries, data on whole ecosystem carbon stocks and biogeochemical carbon fluxes are often lacking. There is also a scarcity of information on carbon export fluxes in Indonesian mangroves. To better understand the role of AP mangroves in global carbon stocks and climate, more detailed and comparable research on biogeochemical processes is necessary.
A schematic representation of an overall carbon budget for Asia-Pacific mangroves, applying a box model to summarize values across all studies (year of studies from 2011 to 2020).