Thursday Workshop

Thursday 6 Nov: 9am-12.30pm - morning tea included

Room: 2.08

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The workshop will be facilitated by members of the Aotearoa New Zealand Coastal Wetland and Blue Carbon Community of Practice.

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Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have approximately 80,000 ha of land with potential for coastal wetlands restoration. This would provide multiple benefits for communities, climate and biodiversity. Voluntary carbon markets offer one possible financing mechanism to help support saltmarsh restoration. Currently this is an open book for New Zealand, with the potential to use either international standards/methodologies or even create a domestic scheme like other countries have done.  There has been a lot of preliminary science and policy work achieved that can contribute to this thinking.

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The aim of this workshop is to consider and discuss what ‘robust-enough’ looks for the science underpinning a sound blue carbon credit scheme. We aim to draw on existing information, case studies, and participants’ experience from within New Zealand and around the world. Insights from this workshop will be used to help inform how New Zealand could create a fit-for-purpose, easily accessible, yet robust blue carbon scheme.

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Blue carbon and biodiversity valuation for coastal habitats in Aotearoa NZ

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This part of the workshop is facilitated by Phoebe Stewart-Sinclair: Earth Sciences NZ.

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This discussion forms part of a project to develop a method for a national biodiversity market designed to incentivise restoration and protection of coastal environments and deliver improved biodiversity outcomes. The project aims to establish a robust framework for assessing the potential biodiversity benefits of coastal projects—enabling comparison of benefits and confidence levels across initiatives to support biodiversity market mechanisms.

 

The workshop will contribute to the development of protocols for quantitatively or semi-quantitatively valuing biodiversity in coastal habitats, including mangroves, saltmarsh, seagrass, and unvegetated tidal flats.

 

Through expert elicitation, participants will address key questions such as:

• What activities have the greatest capacity to protect and restore coastal ecosystems at scale in Aotearoa New Zealand?

• Which biodiversity indicators and metrics represent best practice for coastal habitats, and how can these be adapted to the New Zealand context?

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The outcomes of the workshop will help identify suitable indicators for biodiversity assessment and determine which restoration and conservation actions are most likely to deliver measurable biodiversity gains in New Zealand’s coastal habitats.