Securing climate finance for global mangroves blue carbon projects: Indications from the rate of return perspectives

The social cost of carbon (SCC) can be used to indicate the benefits (or returns) of efforts in cutting a unit of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. SCC by design captures the global externality caused by climate change. However, the spatial heterogeneity of climate change damage creates inequality in the rates of return on investments for augmenting the natural capital of carbon sequestration potential in individual nations. In this study, we focus on the global mangroves blue carbon projects and compute the potential rates of return on such natural capital investments, for which we couple country-specific SCC with the unit cost of carbon sequestration via the potential mangroves blue carbon projects to be implemented in various countries. The disproportionalities in per-ton cost of carbon projects and the benefit sharing of the SCC among countries give nations differential incentives for conserving their domestic mangrove ecosystems, a highly potent global commons in mitigating climate change. In particular, developing countries with tropical coastal zones tend to possess extraordinary mangroves carbon sequestration potential yet lack domestic financial resources for conservation – to name a few from our results: Guyana, Solomon Islands, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Panama, Gabon, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. Our calculation of the rates of return to mangrove blue carbon projects helps identify countries that are in dire need of international funding to help secure this natural capital of global sustainability in the face of aggravating climate change.