Salt Marsh: Ecologically Important,Yet Least Studied Blue Carbon Ecosystems in India

Salt marshes are intertidal halophytic vegetations, distributed in mid to lower latitudes. They provide important ecosystem services, including transportation and remineralization of nutrients, habitat for coastal biota, coastal bioshield, biofilters and recreation and cultural benefits. In India, 15 salt marsh species so far have been reported, spread over 1600 km². Salt marshes are known to adapt themselves to the changing environmental conditions fairly quickly by maintaining a balance between the existing pressures and the prevailing state. Thus, they tend to retain a long-term ecosystem sustainability under changing environmental conditions. Recent studies have recognized them for their extraordinary capacity of carbon sequestration, which gives them edge amongst the coastal ecosystems, but the carbon stock is comparatively low due to their alarming decline in global areal extent.

In the Indian context, salt marshes occupy a significant share of the coastline along with the other blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves and seagrasses. This provides India with a very promising alternative for achieving its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution towards climate change mitigation through enhancing additional carbon sinks (INDC goal # 5). But, despite its rich salt marsh diversity and distribution along the entire coastline, Indian salt marshes are one of the most overlooked coastal ecosystems. The documented studies on the Indian marshes are relatively scarce and studies addressing their carbon storage and climate change mitigation potential are totally non-existent. There is an urgent need for targeted scientific studies to be taken up on the Indian salt marsh ecosystems to develop a holistic and updated database, which can support resource management, decision-making and facilitate to estimate Blue carbon economy of India.