![]() It is part of a wider rewilding project that has reintroduced 220,000 oysters to the loch, to provide a habitat for wildlife and act as a water filter to allow seagrass to photosynthesise better. Renton’s aim is to enhance the meadows by half a hectare this year. Indeed, seagrass, which covers about 0.1% of the ocean globally but provides 18% of its carbon storage, is shrinking by 7% each year – equivalent to a football pitch worth vanishing every 30 minutes, according to a 2020 UN report. Its seagrass meadows provided nurseries for herring and cod. The loch once had beds of huge native oysters and scallops. “Most lochs have had damage to the seabed by bottom trawling and aquaculture, with pollution, like nitrates, entering the water.” No one was looking at the carbon in marine sediments … they are poorly mapped, poorly understood and not protected Richard Unsworth, Project Seagrass “Loch Craignish is very typical,” says Renton, examining a map of the 10 remaining meadows. The few patches of seagrass that remain in Loch Craignish are fragmented. A study earlier this year concluded that 92% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost in the past two centuries, with 39% disappearing just since the 1980s, thanks to pollution from industry, mining and farming, along with dredging, bottom trawling and coastal development. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) includes them in national greenhouse gas inventories, but they are also among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. In Scotland, blue carbon stores sequester 28.4 MtCO 2e (tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) a year, about three times more than Scotland’s forests combined.īut while rainforests, peatlands and other habitats on land are well known for their importance in the climate crisis, coastal wetlands remain overlooked. These blue carbon ecosystems sequester up to 2% of the UK’s carbon emissions a year, mostly in soil and, if undisturbed, can store it for millennia. ![]()
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