Policy Gaps and Challenges to Originating High-Quality Blue-Carbon Projects in Asia-Pacific: A Systematic Evidence Synthesis Bolstered by Practitioner Consultations

The Asia-Pacific region contains almost half of the planet’s coastal carbon-sequestering (blue carbon) environments. These habitats (mangroves, salt marshes, seagrasses) are highly valuable for their biodiversity and climate change mitigation potential, but are under threat throughout the region, due in significant part to an insufficient policy environment to protect and restore coastal wetlands/blue-carbon environments. After reviewing 139 relevant articles (identified using SCOPUS and references from the Blue Carbon Handbook, reduced from 403 articles using a series of rejection criteria), we found 27% of papers discuss land tenure/ownership issues, 65% discuss the funding of coastal wetlands, and 40% discuss conflicting jurisdictions and priorities between agencies. Of these studies, 65% were global studies, with Indonesia (8%), and Australia (7%) being the most welldocumented countries. We supplemented our review with a series of practitioner consultations that revealed similar perspectives to the literature findings.