By UN News
One of the most threatened yet overlooked ecosystems on earth, seagrass could have a promising future thanks to its ability to absorb carbon.
Seagrass is a flowering marine plant whose blades form dense meadows in shallow, sheltered areas along coastlines. It has a range of benefits: seagrass acts as a nursery and food source for a wide variety of marine life, provides a home for many fish and charismatic animals such as turtles and dugongs, protects coastlines by absorbing wave energy, produces oxygen and cleans the ocean by soaking up polluting nutrients produced on land by humans.
In addition, seagrass accounts for 10 per cent of the ocean’s capacity to store carbon—so-called “blue carbon”—despite occupying only 0.2 per cent of the sea floor, and it can capture carbon from the atmosphere up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests.
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