Neutralidad climática: papel del Carbono Azul en la costa de Portugal y Galicia

The Galician-North Portugal Cooperation Area (CA) shares the need to find sustainable solutions to preserve our ecosystem services. Climate neutrality is a challenge for the whole of Europe and for the CA. Most human activities involve the emission of greenhouse gases, while nature offers us carbon sinks such as marshes or seagrasses known as “Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCEs). These ecosystems, in addition to very high biodiversity, offer other traditional services such as fishing or shellfish harvesting that, already today, are affected by climate change. Therefore, there is a joint need to identify threats, vulnerabilities, and climate risks faced by these coastal spaces and to establish coordinated actions for their preservation. CAPTA aims to establish the basis for the development of joint policies and planning instruments to facilitate the achievement of climate neutrality and strengthen coastal ecosystem services, improving their resilience. CAPTA will allow the creation of a cross-border cooperation framework on these issues, making available homogeneous procedures and comparable information on climate risks, which will make it possible to define coordinated actions. Specifically, new environmental indicators will be identified to serve as early warning systems in the future (Act 1); common methodologies will be defined for the analysis CO2 fluxes and blue carbon sequestration on the coast (Act 2); the main climate hazards and risks in the coastal zone in the CA will be identified (Act 3); support will be provided in the design of adaptation and mitigation measures to Climate Change through a participatory process (Act 4) and, the value of Cross-Border Cooperation will be disseminated as a support to a better adaptation and resilience to Climate Change, involving especially the young people (Act 6). CAPTA is innovative in terms of its subject matter: considering the role of carbon sink that some coastal ecosystems in the Euroregion have historically played; and it is innovative in incorporating new technologies (satellites, drones, neural networks) as the basis for decision-making tools. The combined use of these technologies will define a common assessment procedure for salt marshes and seagrass beds on both sides of the border, which has not been previously done in the region.