Why Independent Validation and Verification Are Essential for Blue Carbon Integrity in Indonesia
Sustainable Innovation in Practice (SIP)
Indonesia holds one of the largest blue carbon assets worldwide, with its extensive mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and coastal wetlands. These ecosystems play an indispensable role in climate change mitigation as they are able to capture and store large amounts of carbon, which can remain stored for centuries or even millennia. Average sequestration rate reaches 226 g C m-2 yr-1 in mangrove forests, substantially exceeding the carbon uptake capacity of terrestrial forests, which is typically 5 g C m-2 yr-1 or lower [1]. As global demand for nature-based climate solutions grows, blue carbon projects garner significant interest from governments, investors, and corporations seeking credible pathways toward net-zero commitments.
The Coordinating Ministry for Food Affairs (Kemenko Pangan) has officially acknowledged such enormous potential through the recently announced National Action Plan for the Protection and Management of Blue Carbon Ecosystems (RENAKSI) 2025 – 2030, which states that Indonesia possesses 17% of the world’s blue carbon reserves, with 3.45 million hectares of mangrove forests targeted for protection and management [2]. It is also worth mentioning that such promising action has been supported by government regulations, as stipulated in Government Regulation No. 27 of 2025 and Presidential Regulation No. 110 of 2025 concerning the Protection and Management of Mangrove Ecosystems (PPEM) and the Implementation of Carbon Economic Value (NEV) Instruments and National Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission Control, respectively. These regulations demonstrate the Indonesian government’s strong commitment to protecting and promoting blue carbon not only as an environmental asset but also as a strategic economic tool for the development of coastal communities and the country as a whole. However, the implementation of such initiatives remains challenging, especially when considering their integration with scientific knowledge and certification standards applied worldwide.
As such, several strategies need to be executed to deliver economically viable projects, which can be elaborated as follows.
- Elucidating actionable blue carbon pathways, which implies that a project should provide evidence of long-term carbon storage and demonstrate that activities such as protection, restoration, or management reduce atmospheric GHGs, thus showing a sufficient impact on climate [3]. Based on the selected project, the Environmental Protection and Management Plan (RPPLH) must also be embedded into medium- and long-term development plans.
- Addressing five critical problems that might arise [4], which can be classified as follows:
Additionality: assessing whether the carbon benefits generated by a particular project would have occurred under a business-as-usual scenario and without carbon finance. It is also related to financial additionality, which requires that carbon reductions exceed what would otherwise occur without any funding assistance.
Carbon accounting: precisely measuring carbon stored in mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and coastal wetlands remains a daunting task, primarily due to varying amounts of carbon stocks across locations, ecosystem types, and environmental conditions, thus creating uncertainty in estimating actual carbon removals.
Carbon leakage: conservation efforts in one area may unintentionally shift environmentally damaging activities to another location, which can offset the positive impacts generated.
Environmental integrity: questions arise as to whether blue carbon projects deliver real, measurable, and long-term greenhouse gas reductions, particularly when dealing with risks such as sea-level rise, extreme weather events, ecosystem degradation, and project failure that could reverse carbon gains in the future [5].
Social justice, community participation, and engagement: blue carbon projects should not only emphasize carbon sequestration but should also ensure equitable benefit-sharing, respect for local and indigenous rights, and meaningful stakeholder engagement.
- Finding appropriate frameworks and standards. In fact, frameworks originally developed for terrestrial ecosystems, such as Plan Vivo, Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), Climate Action Reserve, and the American Carbon Registry, have progressively incorporated mangroves, tidal wetlands, seagrasses, and other coastal ecosystems into their systems [6]. Recent revisions of Verra’s VM0033 and VM0007 methodologies include non-permanence risk tools, as reflected in the AFOLU Non-Permanence Risk Tool (NPRT v4.2), improved monitoring requirements, enhanced verification procedures, and mechanisms to address challenges such as sea-level rise and ecosystem migration.
As such, the points mentioned above indeed highlight the importance of rigorous validation and verification systems. Independent validation and verification, therefore, become essential to ensure that carbon credits genuinely represent climate benefits and maintain the confidence of regulators, investors, and carbon credit buyers. In this context, Sustainable Innovation in Practice (SIP) provides independent validation, verification, and certification services to demonstrate the credibility, accuracy, and transparency of sustainability and climate-related claims.
References
[1] McLeod et al. A blueprint for blue carbon: toward an improved understanding of the role of vegetated coastal habitats in sequestering CO2. Front. Ecol. Environ. 2011, 9, 552-560. https://doi.org/10.1890/110004
[2] Rencana Aksi Nasional Perlindungan & Pengelolaan Ekosistem Karbon Biru 2025-2030. 2025. Kementerian Koordinator Bidang Pangan. https://konservasi-id.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Dok-RENAKSI-Karbon-Biru.pdf
[3] J. Howard et al., blue carbon pathways for climate mitigation: Known, emerging and unlikely. Marine Policy 2023, 156, 105788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2023.105788
[4] A. Delamarre et al., The impact of scientific controversies on standards and methodologies in the voluntary blue carbon market. Environ. Sci. Policy. 2025, 171, 104179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2025.104179.
[5] L. Schneider and S. La Hoz Theuer, Environmental integrity of international carbon market mechanisms under the Paris Agreement. Clim. Policy. 2019, 19, 386-400. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2018.1521332
[6] Y. Sun et al., Exploring the international research landscape of blue carbon: Based on scientometrics analysis. Ocean Coast. Manag. 2024, 252, 107106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2024.107106