Kelp Currency: Unlocking the True Value of the Ocean’s Forests

Kelp is the fastest growing organism on the planet. They can grow up to two feet per day in ideal conditions. Kelp forests are California's iconic coastal ecosystems. They are like redwood forests of the underwater worlds. There's just so much life that kelp forests sustain. The sea otters, the seals, the sea lions, the sharks, the fish, the urchins, the invertebrates. Studying the flux of carbon through a kelp forest is incredibly challenging. It's underwater, it's moving, it's dynamic. There's all these challenges from year to year. If anyone can solve that problem, it's the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. So when I dove in a kelp forest for the first time, I mean you just feel embraced by it. You actually get to dive through a kelp forest like you're a bird flying through the trees. Descending down into a kelp forest where you start to get that the sunlight shining through the kelp blades, you get this golden light reflecting through this beautiful blue water and it's just unlike anything you can experience on land. Like I get goosebumps just thinking about it. But if we can't get a handle on climate change, which is really what we need to be addressing, we're all going to have to come to terms with the ecosystems that we have known and grown to love are going to look different than they did when we were kids. I grew up here in Southern California swimming and surfing in kelp forests and to me it's home. I'm Kevin Wilden, co-founder and co-director of SeaTrees, a non-profit that protects and restores coastal ecosystems around the world. SeaTrees is stoked to collaborate with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to study how kelp forests can help reverse climate change and protect and restore biodiversity. It's terrifying how kelp forests are declining around the world due to climate change. I mean it's no joke, kelp forests are under threat. In California we've lost 90 percent of our kelp forests in the last 10 years including La Jolla where we're currently doing our research. It's a charismatic ecosystem yet it's chronically underfunded and I feel like we can do something about it. Understanding the flux of carbon through a kelp forest from the atmosphere to the ocean is the critical challenge. So when we think about carbon in a kelp forest there's a big giant question mark as to how much there is and how much it fluctuates over time from region to region, under warming conditions, under normal conditions, all of these things are questions that we're trying to answer. Determining whether kelp forests can be considered a form of carbon sequestration is a very big project. It is overwhelming and it's really complicated but you know that's science for you. As a marine ecologist I am an economist of nature and carbon is the currency of ecosystems so it makes a lot of sense to me to study and understand what is the kelp carbon budget and how that can be sustaining the trophic web and also be potentially incorporated to the carbon credit market. And that is one of the goals of our research. Science at Scripps is doing to study exactly how kelp sequesters carbon and that's the big unknown right now is the key to unlocking the power to fund kelp forest restoration through tools like carbon markets. So carbon markets are basically a way to finance nature-based projects like kelp forest restoration by connecting somebody who wants to reduce their carbon footprint with a project that can reduce emissions from the atmosphere. So carbon markets have been around for a long time and it started in terrestrial forests and over time we've included more and more habitats into carbon markets and in the coastal space we now have methodologies that exist to get carbon credits from mangrove forests, salt marshes, even seagrass meadows but we don't have good methodologies to evaluate the carbon sequestered from kelp forests. If we can develop that methodology using good science then we can unlock finances to support restoration and conservation of kelp forests in ways that we can't do right now. We can understand exactly how kelp sequesters carbon then there's potential to unlock funding to restore kelp forest globally. The reason we're in this climate catastrophe is because our economic system does not value the ecology of the planet. It calls it an externality and what we're trying to do is solve that by making an opportunity for kelp forests to be valued internally in our economic system by quantifying the carbon and biodiversity benefit of kelp forests. This is how we support the protection of the ocean that is vital to our life on earth. This is where we can bring together ecology and economy. The carbon market is a two billion dollar market and only 0.2 percent of those funds are being used to support coastal habitats. So there's a huge margin to work with here that we can tap to support kelp forest restoration and conservation if we can figure all these things out. And so right now there's a high barrier to entry for somebody to do a kelp forest restoration or conservation project as a carbon project because so much of it is unknown and so we're trying to be some of those trailblazers for kelp forest finance. We've always dreamed to be a marine ecologist and to feel like my childhood dream is still supported to this day by initiatives like these. It's so amazing. We want to keep this going because we're getting very excited about the results and we want to keep the project going. It's still rolling right?