Polar Ocean Mitigation Potential

POMP will advance the scientific understanding of how climate change impacts biodiversity and carbon sequestration potential in emerging and rapidly changing polar marine ecosystems, and, through these impacts, the project will evaluate how resilience and adaptation potential in the polar regions are being altered. The aim is to provide new quantitative knowledge of the mitigation potential of blue carbon in emerging coastal and oceanic habitats and to assess the scope for their inclusion in carbon accounting at national and international levels. Our approach is to study each step in the biological carbon flow from CO2-capture by primary producers, through transformations and intermediate storage, to long-term sequestration. We will do this by combining analyses of new and existing data at several Arctic and Antarctic Learning Sites and use this to develop and validate new ecosystem models and remote sensing algorithms. These will then be used to provide large-scale assessments of changes in blue carbon habitat distributions and their CO2 capture and sequestration potential, both now and in the future. The new knowledge generated will be presented to the scientific community and to decision makers and managers as policy briefs to guide the designation of marine protected areas that recognize both diversity and blue carbon potential. The POMP consortium is highly qualified to meet this task with world-leading experts on blue carbon and climate change impacts in the polar regions, and partners that bring together scientific expertise, extensive unpublished data, polar infrastructure, and unique sampling opportunities as well as experience and resources from several national and EU projects directly related to this call. Participation of three Canadian partners eligible for national funding assures excellent opportunities for cross Atlantic collaboration with a pan-Arctic focus.