Could Seagrass form part of a world carbon strategy

 It is often suggested that one should try to learn something new every day.

And my bit of new knowledge for today, courtesy of BBC Radio 4, was that certain forms of seagrass are amazingly efficient - up to thirty times more so than most other marine plants - at sequestering carbon.

I read that although seagrasses account for less than 0.2% of the world's oceans, they sequester approximately 10% of the carbon buried in ocean sediment each year (27.4Tg of carbon annually). Per hectare, seagrasses can store up to twice as much carbon than terrestrial forests. They also act as a nursery for juvenile fish and marine creatures.

Perhaps we should be looking at whether mankind can set aside some areas of the seas where encouraging the growth of wild seagrass, or even setting up seagrass farms, would not do damage in other ways and where it might be a means of reducing the impact of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere. I would not see this as an alternative to reducing the amount of carbon we are releasing, but of mitigating the damage already done./

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