Abstract: 

Mangroves provide numerous ecological, social and economic benefits that include carbon sequestration, habitat for biodiversity, food, recreation and leisure, income and coastal resilience. In this regard, mangrove-based carbon market projects (MbCMP) – involving mangrove conservation, protection and restoration – is a Nature-based Solution (NbS) for climate change mitigation. Despite the proliferation of blue carbon projects, highly publicized need for local community participation by developers and existing project implementation standards, local communities are usually left out for several reasons, such as lack of capacity to engage in business to business (B2B) market agreement and communication gaps. Local communities need to be engaged and supported at all stages of the MbCMP development process to enable them to protect their ecological, economic and social interests as custodians of such a critical ecosystem. In this paper, we provided fifteen strategic recommendations to engage and secure the interests of local communities in the growing mangrove carbon market trade. The considerations are grouped into four categories – i) project development and community engagement, ii) capacity building and educational activities, iii) transparency in resource allocation and distribution and iv) partnerships with local entities and long term monitoring. We expect our study to increase local participation and community-level ecological, social and economic benefits from MbCMP by incorporating equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms in a B2B conservation agreement model.

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