Blue Carbon with Sanjayan

Published Mar 27, 2024, 7:01 AM

Did you know that one of the most effective absorbers of carbon dioxide is... seaweed? Sanjayan, the CEO of Conservation International, joins the show to talk about how we can harness the power of the ocean to slow the impacts of global heating. Show notes from Chris:

  • The world’s oceans are crucial for the health of our planet, helping regulate the climate and global carbon budget. The London School of Economics has a great explainer. Coastal ecosystems are super important. Mangrove forests and seagrass meadows are incredibly effective at locking up carbon, helping limit the amount of global heating. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA for short) has a fabulous 101 here.
  • Conservation International are doing amazing work with communities around the world to protect nature. You can learn more about the inspiring Vida Manglar “Blue Carbon” Project in Columbia on their website.
  • There are so many fantastic community projects around the world that bring people together to work on nature-based solutions. Search online for a group near you. For those in California, check out Tree People and Friends of the LA River. And of course, wherever you are, there is the brilliant Support and Feed, founded by Maggie Baird. Sign up today to eat at least one plant-based meal a day for 30 days. Take the pledge today.

It is the hardest working habitat type on planet Earth. If I could be king for the day of the entire planet, and there's only one thing I could do, I would protect all mangroves. Globally, It's only found in a very sort of a sliver of our planet.

Fucked.

Welcome to I'm fucking the future. I'm your host. Chris Turney are a climate scientist from Sydney, Australia. Today, a lot of people look to Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the next big startup to solve the climate crisis. But a lot of these solutions neglect the communities that are affected most by the crisis. It doesn't have to be that way. Actually, let me just say it should not and cannot be that way, because the answers to this crisis lie in our communities. That people have taken care of this earth and there's a small parcel of land or water on it for generations upon generations. They have solutions and that's one of the reasons that our guest today has been so successful. M Sanjan is an organizer, conservationist and media personality whose passion for the environment was instilled from an early age. Growing up in Sierra Leone. He's the CEO of Conservation International, and global nonprofit that does help protect more than six million square kilometers of land and ocean across more than seventy countries. Today, we're going to be focusing on a big part of this mission, their work on the world's oceans.

We're fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.

Our oceans are a major and wildly underutilized tool in solving the climate crisis, not just because they can strengthen the resilience of communities, but also because the ocean is a giant carbon capture machine. It draws down vast amounts of carbon in the atmosphere and ultimately moderates for climate, and it can do so much more. It offers the opportunity to walk back from the precipice we face. M Sungean is a biologist turned into national conservation superstar, and because of his upbringing, he's particularly interested in using our natural resources and water in particular to solve Earth's greatest challenges. Sungan grew up as Sierra Leone in a small logging and mining town surrounded by forest.

And here's the amazing thing about this place. This was the place that David Attenborough got his start in television. Wow, very first time you see Assinbourgh on TV, it was in this not just in cyri Leone, but in this community that.

I grew up in.

Good Grief, and I think it's kind.

Of remarkable that this tiny little town was the place that he he sort of got going on television and then I had the chance to do it.

At the time, Sierra Leone was home to some of the most incredible forests in the world, so it made sense that one of the world's top nature educators would film their show there. And he wasn't the only one. Gerald Double spent time there too. He's another celebrated British naturalist, famous for his book My Family and Other Animals.

So Darrel gets to start in sirial Leone too.

Her first appearance on television isn't the same place. It's actually kind of amazing, right.

It's incredible. You could imagine there's some producer there says hang on, I did a job there. We could go there.

They used to call him, and when we were kids, we used to hear about this guy that the local people would call mister White.

In decades to figure ound.

Mister White was durrel o God because he was white and because he had a white beard at the time.

So you've got mister White, David Dattenborough, and Lil Sanjan all learning about nature in the same twenty mile area totally covered in forest.

And my dad, here's an amazing thing. My dad at the time was working for a logging company.

Before the logging industry got to Sierra Leone, more than seventy percent of the country was made up of biologically diverse forest, seventy percent. When European colonizes invaded the region, they began exploiting these incredible forests for their timber. This paved a way for a commercial logging industry to take over the country.

So this company would go into the forest and cut down one giant tree, loaded onto truck, that's how gigantic these trees were, and then bring it back in. And as a child, I would go in with them sometimes and run up and down the log as the tree once the tree fell down, and collect animals from the canopy and bring them home, like chameleons and baby parrots and things like that.

And then and you know, back then, we didn't have a sense of the loss of the forest.

I don't really remember feeling really bad about the tree, you know, because it just felt like a big frontier and it felt like there was so much more Now that same forest, it is one of the rarest forests in the world now.

Heartbreakingly, less than five percent of our original forest remains today, that.

Upper Guineaan forest, there's only a sliver of it left. It's got thirteen speeds of primates, pygmy hippos, a few elephants.

It's still there.

It's still that amazing biodiversity, but it's so much smaller than it used to be.

Oh r, I forgive me, but we've really got to discuss how terrible the global logging industry really is. Deforestation makes up about fifteen percent of our global greenhouse emissions, and yet this industry continues to grow. Much of a wood that is cut down today is processed into sawn, timber, pulpwood board, and wood based panels, and we as consumers love process would. In the US, demand for wood based panels has increased by eight hundred percent of the past three decades. We simply can't get enough of it. It's how we end up with fast furniture, you know, like how your parents' dining room table seem to last for fifty years and yours barely holds up after five. But back when Sangan's family was in Sierra Leone working for the logging industry, we really had no idea that the commercialization of our trees would turn into fast furniture trends on TikTok. But here we are. We're fifteen percent of our global emissions caused by deforestation and a fast furniture industry that's only getting worse. So Bat Desangean. He grew up in this incredible environment where they were able to save chameleons and watched David Attenberg get his start. Pret you dream if for a kid is into nature, right. He left Sierra Leone to study conservation biology under Michael Soule at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Michael Soule is often seen as the father of conservation biology. He coined the word conservation biology, and he was really a big figure and in really established the field. And Michael at the time, I went to study cheatahs, you know, like the African cat, right, That's what I really wanted to study, and.

That would have been very cool.

It would have been very cool.

But interestingly, very sadly, my project got canceled halfway through because of some funding dispute, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with the project. But I was studying in Namibia, uh and there was money that was going from the US to Namibia that got caught up in some politics. My project got canceled halfway there, so I had to quickly switch and find something because I was on the student visa right so clock is sticking, you know, my visa runs out, I'm getting sent back, and so I ended up switching to study. You know a little rat that lives underground. They're called gopherst If you ever watched the movie Caddyshack, Yes, no money is off to killing Gover like that's it, And that's all I knew about.

Go first. I've got a more important job.

I want you to kill every gopher on the course.

Check me if I'm wrong, Sandy. But if I kill all the golfers, they're gonna lock me have to throw away a key.

Go first, job, great kidnaped, Call first a little brown furry rodents. You know my advice I actually gave me you know Caddyshack and said, go watch this.

It'll tell you everything you know. And it's such a depressing sort of story.

Because I was here here, I thought I was going to go out there, you know, and know, live in Africa with a land rover and my binoculars and my khakis and you know, sipping a gin and tonic under an efcresive, watching a spotted cat across the Serengeti.

And the plains of Africa.

And I end up instead digging in the dirt in California, in the most boring part of California, which is the agricultural region of California, the Central Valley.

But here's the amazing thing about the story, Chris.

You know, in doing that and being forced to do that, I ended up meeting some amazing people. And I started understanding that the people who lived in the Central Valley of California had so much to tell me about the land and about me, Except they weren't using words you and I would use. They were using I was using words that had to do with love. I love nature, I love the landscape, I love wildlife. They were using words that had to do with value. You know, we value what's going to happen the soil or fire season, or the crops or when the first day of frost shows up right, And it really opened my eyes that the whole thing about conservation. I always thought that what this field is about is how to protect nature. It really isn't nature will take care of itself. It really is about how to protect people. And when that turn happened to me, it really made a lot of sense because I do come from the global South and in the countries that I live in and I work in and Conservation International works in. If you want to make conservation stick, it has to make sense for those communities and those people. And that was my first glimpse notion that these people who we have often seen as the enemy could really be our allies.

We only shifted the frame through which we were talking about what we do.

This mentality and approach to conservation led Sangan to Conservation International. Their mission is to protect communities by protecting nature.

You cannot get to a stable human friendly climate without including nature. So not only is it an ally, but ignoring it is not enough either. Without without it, you're not going to get to the numbers don't add up, right, And another way to put it is that even if miraculously overnight all of our energy use becomes renewable instantly, and I think we are heading in that direction, you're still going to be, you know, aft because so much of the carbon emissions that we get comes from our destruction.

Our war on nature.

One of the key priorities for Conservation International is preserving and protecting the ocean because it has a critical role to play in carbon capture.

Now the shouldn't have been a bit ignored in that whole equation. It turns out they're great at sequestrian carbon. They're also incredibly important in buffering temperature itself. Like this giant body of water is great at absorbing that heat, and without it, we would be in a frying planet already.

I mean, it's amazing, amoun it's only ninety percent or something, it's ninety three percent.

Yes, the valace amount of energy that hits this planet gets absorbed by the ocean.

It's kind of mind boggling how we treat the ocean.

I don't think we should continue to put out fossil fuel emissions. I think we need to get that to zero, and get that to zero fast. But we also need to do this other thing, which is protect and restore nature at scale.

You can't do one without doing the other.

And you get great return on the nature side right now, because frankly it's cheap.

Oceans are carbon sucking machines, and the seaweed didn't help forest within. Oceans are spectacular at absorbing carbon. In my home in Australia, I regularly swimming in the ocean on the weekends, and as I swim for the sea grass, I can't help but notice just how much biodiversity of they hold. But behind the scenes, the water I swim through and all the wildlife I admire is working over time to save our planet. It's such an important part of a global carbon cycle. Not to mention it might actually be the cheapest carbon capture we have available to us.

I'd be willing to bet this.

It's probably the most carbon rich environment that you have in Australia.

Those seagrass bet and that's very little.

You know, people don't really know that how important they are for the world's future but also Australia's future. The amazing thing about that also is that when I was there, you know, I was studying I was. I was there with some researchers who were looking at dogongs. Oh right now that live on the coast of Australia.

If you haven't seen the do goong, please google. It is absolutely the amazing do cele sea mammals. They're kind of graceful, but Sanjin explains it far better.

Mythical the old sirens of the deep right. That's yes, the.

Mermaids legends came from the sea cow. They're very very threatened. Now once upon a time in Sri Lanka you could find them there. Now there's probably fifty there. Both sides of Australia have dogongs. But it turns out that sea grass seeds only really germinate if they go through the gut of a dogong. So dougong poop basically is full of seeds that are primed to germinate. If you just take sea grass seeds and just plant them, the germination rate is I think one fifth or one sixth the rate you get when they go through the gut of a do goong. So dogong's, it turns out, are incredibly important carbon sequestration catalysts, if you will. So here's this animal, this dozy thing called the sea cow that again could be part of the future of our planet.

Which brings us to the other big point of this episode. Our oceans might save us. All the ocean suck up twenty five percent or so of the amount of carbon that we humans put up into the atmosphere, and that's why Conservation International has made ocean conservation a key part of their strategy.

If you don't have a healthy ocean, you are making it impossible to have a healthy planet. When it comes to oceans, we focus on three areas, you know. The first is really creating marine protected areas. So only about five percent of the oceans are actually protected at any reasonable level, and that's far below the thirty percent or so that we think we need. We are putting in substantial funding to help create, better manage, and better protect marine.

Protected areas around the world.

So we want to go from five percent to ten percent, which is about eighteen million square kilometers of ocean that we want to add to the protected area network around the world, and we're on a great pathway to doing that. The second part of it is is restoration of core reefs and mangroves. I would say that the third part of this is fisheries. Right, So you know, three hundred plus million people are directly dependent on fish in the Pacific for their primary source of protein. It's incredibly important to the GDP of many many nations. If we don't find a great way to manage those fisheries resources in a sustainable way, you know, the world is going to be poorer. And some of these countries really just don't have an alternative, right, no alteri. So, particularly in the Pacific, we're very heavily involved in the tuna fisheries in the Pacific, but around the world around coastal fisheries. You know, how do you manage those fisheries better, How do you think about aquaculture and make sure they're sustainably done, and how do you make sure that you know, it's the last hunter gathering resource we have left, right, there's no other There's not other thing that humans go out there into nature and gather in large numbers of the old days.

People often forget that, don't they they're actually going out seafishing, your hunting. We're still hunter gatherers scale right, It's amazing, and so this is the last.

Thing we have to do, and you know what a shame if we if we don't find a way to do that right.

I want to go back to something Sanjan mentioned earlier, mangroves and coral reefs. Now, coral reefs are greatly underprotected, but we all know how valuable they are. They're biological hotspots about the court of all marine life on the planet living coral reefs. Plus they're crucial to local economies which depend on the reefs for tourism and fishing. They should be protected. But how often do you see people shouting to protect our mangroves? I mean, do you even know what a mangrove is.

It is the hardest working habitat type on planet Earth. If I could be king for the day of the entire planet, and there's only one thing I could do, I would protect all mangroves globally.

It's only found in a very.

Sort of a sliver of our planet, A tiny, tiny portion of our planet has mangroves in them. So they are sort of an aquatic or a semi aquatic tree, and they are fast growing for the most part, and they grow in the boundary between salt water and land. And when I was growing up, they were really seen as just a terrible habitat. They're hard to get through, lots of insects in them. They're basically in swamps right right on the coast, and if you are if you're trying to get to a coastline, if you're trying to fish, if you're trying to do anything like that, you can't get to the beach because of the mangroves. It's moist, lots of bugs, and you can't really see the sea. You can hear it, but you can't see it from lamb because you've got this big forest, this thick, intertangled network of aerial roots and tree cover, multiple species, all twisted with one another, and then surrounded by water that's tidal. So sometimes it's just mud and you step into it and you're going to sink, you waste. Sometimes you have to get in there with a boat.

Look, as someone who loves our planet, I've got to say, even this is ridiculously understating how much people don't like mangroves. They have this smell like stale water mixed with the overpowering odes or rotten eggs. It's of a mistaken for sewage. So safe to say they're not coral reefs. People don't go on vacation to admire and take pictures of mangroves, but they should.

They end up being incredibly important for humans and for nature. So mangroves are obviously important because they stop sea level rise. They protec coastlines from big waves. They're really good at blocking waves. If you remember the big tsunami that hit Asia back in I think two thousand and what is it six or two thousand and four won that hit Sri Lanka and Thailand and Indonesia, mangroves really did protect some of that coastline and places that had mangroves were protected and is that didn't lost it. They're also incredibly important of fish because they're fish nurseries, and lots of fish that you go out there and catch in the open ocean end up spending their lives.

As babies sheltered in the mangroves.

And then they're really important for climate change because they are fantastic at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. So all plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere, that's how they grow. They're fantastic at doing this, it's called photosynthesis, and they're just a giant carbon captive machine. Mangroves do it really fast, and mangroves put all that carbon that they captured underground and underwater. So what's good about mangroves is they're not just capturing it in their branches and their leaves, but they're really good at setting it all the way down at their root systems, and that goes down six meters underwater, right like under the mud. And so that mud under the mangroves, if you ever dig into it, it's.

Dark black mud that is chock full of carbon, and.

It's like four to six times the amount that an equivalent sort of chunk of rainforest would store. So hector by hector, acre by acre, mangroves gives us the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to capturing carbon, and then they do all these other things as well. So you know, my belief is that no mangroves should ever be cut down.

But sadly, mangroves are still being attacked.

They're still being cut down, and we should actually restore mangroves to their former glory. And we have a big project, a joint project with lots of other groups called the Mangrove Breakthrough that is really trying to incentivize all the countries of the world that have mangroves to protect them.

But that's not the only solution. Sangan and his teams are also working with private companies to create carbon buyback credits for promote for creation and protection of mangroves.

So we brought the first blue carbon project to market, which was in Colombia in a project called Vita Manglare. And in this case, one of the one of the partners that came into to help us do that was Apple. So you know, Apple's got a bit of a carbon footprint. Now most of their footprint they're trying to reduce on a track to reducing by reducing their emissions, reducing packaging, etc. There's some part of the mission that is hard to abate, and it's that part of that emissions that they're trying to get ahead of the curve on and meet their goals sooner than they can do through industrial processes, and then doing that by protecting these high carbon ecosystems.

In this case, this.

Project, community run project on the coast of Columbia, which is just this amazing mangrove.

Forest community is at the heart of these projects.

They're involved in the protection activities of it. They're involved in how the revenue is accruede and then spent, and then importantly in this project, they even got to choose who they were willing to sell this carbon too.

Gosh really really yes, so involved in the whole process.

They were involved all process because, as I said, I mean, we had the choice of whether we would sell it to a say, an oil and gas company, or whether we would go with maybe a company that has a higher brand profile and really much high ambitions, like Apple, and it was the community's decision to go with Apple. Can make all sorts of jokes about whether or not they were going to get an iPhone out of it, but they they that even in very rural parts of the world, people know Apple.

That's incredible as lovely in Colombia, the local communities around the mangroves are also benefiting from the project. They're paid for their labor, and community organizations also receive funding for their projects.

And the wonderful thing about the funding, particularly for carbon projects, is it not year by year. It's like a thirty year thing, because you're selling those credits for years of thirty years.

So imagine having that like that life for us.

So the communities know that actually they've got this long term income stream right exactly, long.

Term fantastic can plan around it. They can build a school because of it. I mean, they can really invest in the right way. And that project is I think like three or four x oversubscribed so once while yeah, I mean like there's so much demand for.

It because mangroves capture carbon. Supporting a mangrove ecosystem on the other side of the world helps you wherever you are. A That's what Tom Starr was talking about a few episodes ago when you mentioned that carbon capture can help create economic equality in our incredibly unequal world.

Like you protect mangroves in Papua New Guinea or West Papua, it will have a direct material impact on my life in New York City.

Wow, that's powerful.

It is. It's true. It's true.

If you're ready to take to the streets and protest for mangrove justice, I'll be there right beside you. Sanjin says that every single one of us can actually support the regeneration of mangroves.

So the thing about mangroves is that you can restore them they do grow back fast, but you've got to do it in the right way. So some of the stuff you might see on YouTube, like you know, all these towns mobilized and they go out and plant a million mangroves in a weekend or something like that, most of them don't succeed because they're they're not using the best sort of available.

Science on how to do it.

You need to understand the hydrology, you need to understand how water moves.

But don't let that warning deter you from going out and getting involved in mangrove restoration. Both Sanjan and I were at a climate conference last year in the UAE and outside the metropolis of Abu Dhabi there's actually a mangrove forest that was only planted ten years ago.

Just north of Abu Dhabi, right there's a restoration site and you can see mangroves that have been planted before, like ten years ago, and they're quite big. They're quite big now, So you know they can do it if you do it right.

So yes, the average person actually can get involved in mangrove restoration.

You just need to find a credible organization to sort of work with.

And don't forget the two big tools in front of.

Us, the two big levers we have. The two big levers we have.

Are government and private sector. We need to keep the pressure on governments. They do listen to a They listen to concerned So vote, you know, vote again, get involved right, make your voice heard with government for sure. Number two companies. Reward the companies that are trying to do the right thing, Punish the companies that are not, And don't be too harsh on it, like it's not easy to do this right. You're not trying to get the perfect trying it better.

We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.

Sanjan and Conservation International are having a big impact protecting the natural biodiversity of our oceans. It's one of the most important things we can do to slow global heating because all of those mangrove and kelp forests and doogongs and other sea life enhance the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dixide. So you might be wondering how you can get involved, which brings us to our final segment of a show where we ask what the fuck can I do?

What fuck can I know?

I'd like to welcome back to the show our good friend and activist Maggie Bird. Maggie, what did you think of our chat with Sanjan Okay?

Well, first of all, how amazing are kelp and seaweed? Incredible? Conservation International scientists found that seaweed absorbs as much carbon as one point six billion trees. One point six billion. I cannot get my brain around that number. So I just want to first acknowledge that all of us should be more appreciative of the often overlooked seaweed. And then the second thing, I want to encourage people to consider volunteering with the local environmental group. Places like Conservation International depend on financial support to do their incredible work, but there's also a lot of local environmental groups that depend on our volunteer time to accomplish their goals, whether you're working in the trenches or serving on their boards. True, I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be something you do every single week, but just making a commitment to a local environmental group that you'll volunteer, say once a month with a beach cleanup or a tree planning event, that can make a huge difference.

So how can people get started with volunteering? Where can they start? Well?

If I was going to find one here in Los Angeles, for example, I might just google Volunteer LA Environmental Group, check out their websites, look at their mission statements, and then reach out and see what their needs are.

That's a great suggestion.

Yeah, And you know what, you can narrow your search by the issue that you care about most. So if you're into greening your neighborhood, check out tree People. If you care about food equity and how it relates to the climate crisis, we'll check out my organization Support and Feed Friends of the La River, for example, is focused on how we turn that big concrete waterway of ours into a dynamic, functioning ecosystem. We have so many cool orgs just here in LA and with a little searching you can find similar organizations wherever you might be.

Such a good point, Maggie. Our time is so valuable to local nonprofits. We've all got to do our part.

We really do, and it's a great way to do it.

And that's what the fuck you can do?

What the fuck can I do? Oh?

Fucked?

You may have started this show because you thought we were seriously fucked. Now, don't get me wrong. We're not in a great place, but I hope you, like me, have been in Spa by the amazing people out there doing incredible things. If we're going to unfuck this, we need to act quickly, at speed and scale. But perhaps most importantly of all, we need to do this together as one global community. Look, we haven't covered all the solutions to the climate crisis, we haven't even touched the edge. But there are great people and great ideas out there that can make a difference. We really can turn things around, and it's already starting to happen. So get involved and let's all unfuck the future together. For now. This is Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia. Hope to see you soon.

We're Fucking the Future.

Unfucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meridi Brian. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard Brian Grazer, Carral Welker and Nathan Chloke are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice, sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lilly Hayden, and producing services by Peter mcgigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on Apple Podcasts, or whether you get your podcasts

Unf*cking the Future

Unfucking the Future takes us on an environmental journey with our knowledgeable guide, scientist Ch 
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