A roadmap for Ocean Negative Carbon Emission eco-engineering in sea-farming fields

JIAO, NIANZHI; ZHU, CHENBA; LIU, JIHUA; LUO, TINGWEI; BAI, MINDONG; YU, ZHIMING; CHEN, QUANRUI; RINKEVICH, BUKI; WEINBAUER, MARKUS; THOMAS, HELMUTH; FERNÁNDEZ-MÉNDEZ, MAR; LÓPEZ-ABBATE, CELESTE; SIGNORI, CAMILA NEGRÁO; NAGAPPA, RAMAIAH; KOBLÍEK, MICHAL; KAARTOKALLIO, HERMANNI; HYUN, JUNG-HO; JIAO, FANGLUE; CHEN, FENG; CAI, WEI-JUN

The Innovation Geoscience

Innovation Press

Año: 2023 vol. 1

2959-8753

Carbon neutralization has become a significant, inevitable, and urgent strategy for both adaptation and mitigation of global warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and its environmental consequences such as ocean acidification. However, the reduction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions often conflicts with economic development. In contrast, environmentally friendly negative carbon emissions can be a way of killing two birds with one stone, capturing carbon dioxide and ensuring economic development, and therefore become imperative to achieve carbon-neutral goals. The ocean, as the largest active carbon reservoir, has great potential for negative carbon emissions. However, since the ocean has stored 93% of the world’s CO2, further negative carbon emissions remain a formidable challenge. On top of that, both the approaches and implementation fields should be appropriate and must comply with the UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea, and the International Maritime Organization London Convention and Protocol. Sea-farming, being a low cost and high productivity manner, is a well developed marine industry, and is further promoted nowadays by the UN given that the world food needs are under pressure of 8 billion world population. However, rapid and over-intensive sea-farming developments entail a series of environmental risks and problems, such as eutrophication, deoxygenation, acidification in the bottom water, and potential harmful microalgal blooms in the surface water. Under such circumstances, the Global Ocean Negative Carbon Emissions (ONCE) program (https://www.global-once.org), endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, has proposed a comprehensive eco-engineering approach， which integrates the well-known biological carbon pump (BCP) and the carbonate counter pump (CCP), and the newly established microbial carbon pump (MCP),1 as well as the “unmanageable” solubility carbon pump (SCP) into a comprehensive “BCP-CCP-MCP-SCP (BCMS)” approach, just like the Business-Continuity Management-System (BCMS). We here propose a road map for the BCMS approach.