ByHaley Zaremba- Feb 02, 2025, 10:00 AM CSTSeaweed farms can effectively capture and store carbon in the seabed, potentially doubling the carbon storage capacity of surrounding areas.
This natural carbon sequestration process not only helps mitigate climate change but also enhances the resilience of our oceans.
Seaweed aquaculture, already a booming industry, offers a sustainable and scalable solution with multiple environmental and economic benefits.
Nature offers the best carbon storage technology the world has to offer. Natural resources such as forests, grasslands, soil, oceans and other bodies of water naturally absorb and store carbon, serving as massive carbon sinks for our planet. Optimizing these natural, passive processes offers the most efficient and cost-effective form of carbon storage. Planting a forest, for example, costs far less than building a farm of carbon-storing machinery, and it also offers a plethora of other positive environmental externalities. For this reason, scientists have long studied these naturally occurring processes to learn about how we can take advantage of and even enhance them to meet global climate goals. Achieving the legally binding goals set out in the Paris agreement – which aims to limit global warming to 1.5º Celsius above pre-industrial averages – will not only require the rapid expansion of clean energy, but also major gains in removing the carbon that we’ve already put into the atmosphere, and then storing it somewhere that it would be causing further harm to the environment.
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}A new study shows that seaweed farms could be a promising solution to this challenge. A new study published this month in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change shows that seaweed farms can pull carbon out of the water around them and store it in the seabed below. When the carbon-rich plants die, they fall to the ocean floor and are quickly buried deeply, where they can hold on to that carbon for decades or even centuries. As a result, the study found that the amount of carbon stored under the seaweed farms was about twice as much as nearby sediment beds without seaweed farming operations. The potential of seaweed farms to suck carbon out of seawater, another natural carbon sink, could be great news for the resilience of our oceans. As reported by phys.org, this phenomenon could “presumably allow the world’s oceans to absorb more atmospheric carbon without causing catastrophic side effects such as global coral die-offs.”Not only could this have hugely positive implications for the carbon storage capacities of our oceans, the study also found that the technology only gets better with age. The study looked at 20 seaweed farms around the world with a wide range of ages and sizes, and found that older farms were able to absorb and store more carbon. Amazingly, the oldest farm included in the study has been operational for 300 years. The older farms were able to sequester up
