Founders Q&A with Noah Planavsky and Gabriella Kitch
Mangroves are powerhouses of carbon removal, but we’re only counting a portion of the climate impact from these systems. Professor Noah Planavasky and researcher Gabriella Kitch at The Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture is working to change that by getting carbon markets to recognize that the dissolved inorganic carbon produced by mangrove ecosystems — specifically the carbonate alkalinity — is a form of long-term carbon storage.
By properly accounting for this carbon flux, they hope to unlock stable, long-term financing for restoration projects that protect coastlines, support fisheries, and build climate resilience. With studies indicating that 75% of mangrove restoration projects fail, likely due to lack of sustained funding, getting this right could be transformative.
1: Can you explain the project in simple terms?
Noah: Blue carbon ecosystems, especially mangroves, have tremendous capability to remove atmospheric CO2 while also being one of the most obvious examples where carbon removal helps communities. They provide coastal resiliency and preserve marine ecosystems.
We know there’s tremendous potential for restoration, but we’re not doing a great job of meeting that. The goal of our project is to valorize some of the carbon fluxes that aren’t being quantified in current protocols. What’s exciting is that it’s actually the most durable portion — the alkalinity produced from these ecosystems — that’s not being counted. We want to develop tools and a framework to count the stable inorganic carbon from these systems. This pool of carbon has been ignored in protocols so far even though it is the carbon removal that has the lowest risk of reversibility.
2: Why should we care about ocean alkalinity?
Gabriella: Ocean alkalinity is the ocean’s capacity to take up more carbon dioxide. If you think of the ocean as a sponge for CO2, this increases the size of the sponge.
What’s exciting about this project is that by connecting it to mangroves, which naturally increase ocean alkalinity, it becomes more tangible for people to understand, particularly communities living near mangroves.
3: How do mangroves increase alkalinity?
Noah: Think of them as bio-reactors doing the same processes we’re doing in industrialized carbon removal technologies. They’re creating the ideal conditions to dissolve calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate doesn’t dissolve in surface ocean waters, but mangroves create environments in sediments where you can have extensive dissolution. That takes up the CO2 and mineralizes it, so it’s locked away.
4: Are mangroves the only ecosystems that do this?
Noah: No, it’s potentially applicable to a range of ecosystems. Seagrasses are one where this can be very important. It can also make seaweed farming more viable if you can valorize the same processes.
We’re focusing on mangroves because they’re the most impactful. The extent of biogeochemical activity driven by mangroves is truly unprecedented. Our hope is that moving this process into carbon markets can also open up and increase public acceptance of industrially-based forms of ocean alkalinity enhancement which have essentially unlimited scaling potential, and other community-rooted aspects like seaweed farming, seagrass restoration, and salt marsh restoration.
Gabriella: Climate mitigation and resiliency are often pursued as separate activities, but what would the total climate impact look like if there was a bridge between the two? This is one clear example where a single project and process can both mitigate and increase resiliency.
5: What gets you most excited about this project?
Noah: The project developers we’ve talked to, many of which are really community rooted, have been really excited about this. Providing support for these developers doing amazing work to expand their footprint is what I’m most excited about.
This isn’t something that’s only paving the way for the future. This can help projects now, in the next couple years. The other aspect is that we think ocean alkalinity enhancement has so much potential but the social perception hasn’t been there. This is a way to raise awareness of the potential of the oceans to be a carbon removal sink while also benefiting communities.
Gabby: Working with project developers will continue to be a big highlight. There are two elements: bringing training opportunities to community members and project developers to expand skill sets, and being able to truly compensate community members to quantify these recognized carbon fluxes.
Looking into the future, hopefully having an impact on the success rates of these projects. Mangrove restoration projects traditionally have a rather low success rate — about 25% — because all the money comes up front and then there’s not a continuous stream to maintain the plantings nor inform a restoration plan that is best for the project.
6: Where are you at now with the project?
Noah: We’re trying to move this from something where we have a sound scientific understanding into something that can directly move into markets. We want to transition from research done to provide a foundation into research through deployment — directly engaging with markets, directly working with large scale restoration projects.
We view this as more than just a playbook and protocols. We want to demonstrate this as well. We want to provide the first examples of how this can be successfully done.
7: What will the Carbon Fix funding cover?
Noah: A lot of the Carbon Fix money will be used to create the playbook and have the first demonstration in commercial sites. Some will be salary, some will cover us going to sites and having the first training, setting people up to make these measurements. We’re starting in April, really hitting the ground running with partners.
Gabby: We’ve done a lot of reconnaissance compiling existing mangrove restoration projects. We just had an initial site visit with a partner in Mexico — we’re targeting that as maybe the first location to roll out these measurements.
Noah: It’s definitely not going to be focused only in the Americas. We have partnerships in India, and Indonesia is really interesting — they’ve just created a framework at the federal level for how carbon markets can benefit the federal government, local communities, and project developers. That’s an area with really massive potential.
8: What’s your vision of the ideal outcome?
Noah: In the short term, we want to provide a way to help mangrove restoration projects to get off the ground and be both feasible and stable. The short-term goal is to make blue carbon projects scale, something that is without question good for both the environment, communities, and carbon removal.
The long-term goal is to raise awareness of ocean alkalinity enhancement and, through successful projects, build broader acceptance of marine carbon removal’s potential at scale.
9: What makes this project challenging?
Noah: Right now we know we can measure the carbon fluxes from the system. The real challenge is figuring out if we can do that in a way that is financially operable. For open system forms of carbon removal, you can measure the fluxes but it may end up costing way more money than we have.
We need to constantly think about how to bring down the cost of monitoring carbon fluxes while still making sure we’re learning from early stage market activity, and not cutting corners so much that we end up with fluxes that aren’t well grounded. You can always make more measurements, but you can spend more money monitoring than on the actual restoration.
You have to transition from “we want as robust understanding as possible” into something that’s compatible with markets, something that can scale. And we need to do it rapidly: I think the next five to ten years will be essential in shaping the long trends in carbon removals.
10: What kind of social, cultural, and political will is needed?
Noah: One of the things that drew me to this project is that there’s very high acceptance of the importance of mangroves. They provide clear benefits to local communities through coastal resiliency. They’re very well established as essential for fishery health. They’re biodiversity hotspots.
Relative to many other interventions, you really don’t have to overcome a large number of societal hurdles, especially relative to other forms of ocean alkalinity enhancement. The main hurdles are continuing to make the case that this is robust carbon removal and that you can measure it. It’s being able to make the case to buyers that this is worth investment.
Part of that will be the first data sets from initial projects showing this is feasible. Given that there’s already really high social acceptance of the importance of mangroves, we’re confident this can really take off.
11: What do you wish people outside the climate space knew?
Noah: People don’t think about carbon removal as something that provides direct benefits to communities — they think it’s only targeting atmospheric CO2. When many people think about geochemical carbon removal, they imagine direct air capture tied to the oil industry.
Geochemical carbon removal will be part of many industries and a key tool for managing ecosystems and repairing damage from extractive industries. The goal is making sure we have robust carbon removal, but an equally important part is trying to help communities and restore damage that came from extractive economies.
For mangroves, it’s trying to repair damage from agriculture, charcoal production, and aquaculture. Mangrove forests are often cleared to build intensive shrimp farms, which have been a huge driver of mangrove loss, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America. I can imagine, and want to fight for, a world where successful restoration projects can provide income for local communities without causing obvious and severe environmental damage. An obvious step in that direction is making sure we are accounting for the full climate impacts of the restoration process.
