Duarte sees this project in the Bahamas as a blueprint (pun intended) for the grander ideas that have fueled his work over the past two decades. He wants to restore all aquatic habitats and creatures to their pre-industrial bounty. He speaks of “blue natural capital” and envisions a future in which nations factor in the value of nature when calculating their economic productivity.
He stresses that this is unlike previous efforts to financialize nature. Since the 19th century, conservationists have argued that protecting bison, lions, or forests is a sound investment, because extinct animals and felled trees can no longer provide booty or timber. These days, ecologists are trying to demonstrate that less-popular habitats such as wetlands can serve humanity as flood control and water purifiers, rather than as places to build shopping malls. But while these efforts may be appealing to hunters and conservationists, they are, as Cambridge economists described on natural capital in a 2021 report commissioned by the UK government, making nature a “global global issue.” It is far from restructuring as a “strong asset portfolio”.
Duarte and I first met at the crowded exhibition grounds of the 2022 United Nations Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. He had traveled some distance from his home in Jeddah. There, he oversees projects ranging from reefing coral and advising on regenerative tourism projects along Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast to global efforts to expand seaweed farming. income from carbon credits). In Egypt, Duarte was scheduled to appear on 22 panels, serving as the scientific face of the kingdom’s plans for a so-called circular carbon economy. In this plan, carbon is treated as a more responsibly managed commodity, often reliant on nature. .
Chami was also there, dressed in a trim suit and wearing a whale tail pendant around her neck. He was part of the Bahamas delegation, which included Prime Minister Davis and various conservationists under Namishita. They arrived with suggestions on how to include biodiversity in the global debate on climate change. Seaweed was their template, ideally one that the Bahamas could replicate around the world as a natural market hub.
The UN conference was a good place to spread the seaweed gospel. The theme of the conference was how to get poor countries hit by disasters like Hurricane Dorian to pay for the damage they caused to wealthy polluters. It was hoped that eventually a UN agreement would be signed, but in the meantime other approaches to moving funds were up in the air. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries have been forced to account for carbon emissions on their balance sheets. High emitters have entered into agreements with resource-poor and biodiversity-rich countries for investments in nature that could help polluters meet their climate change pledges. Mr. Chami’s boss at the IMF had suggested that countries with debt could start looking at using their natural assets, which are measured in terms of carbon equivalents, to pay off debt. “All these poor countries today are going to find themselves very, very rich,” Chami told me.
Chammi said the project in the Bahamas was a story of hope at a conference where the main message often seemed doomed. In his lecture on seagrass, he spoke with tent revivalism. He told the audience that humanity has only a limited amount of time left to fix climate change and that “cute projects” can no longer solve it. Replanting seagrass here requires millions of dollars, and protecting mangrove forests requires a few carbon credits. No, people had to think a thousand times bigger. Chami wanted to know what everyone in Egypt was waiting for. “Why are we bored?” he asked the crowd. “Too much talk. Too little action.”
one day this Last winter, David Harris, a former real estate developer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, flew his private jet over the Little Bahamas Bank. Through his cockpit window, the water below looked like a gloomy painter’s palette. Harris made his way to a weed-cracked dock in the West End of Grand Bahama Island, where he said, Tigress. Harris and the crew, including his 10-year-old daughter, would spend the rest of the week exploring the seagrass meadows of Beneath the Waves.
They were working on a vast area. The Bahamas have a total land area of just 4,000 square miles, but the islands are surrounded by shallow undersea platforms about ten times their size. These levees are the work of coral, building carbonate civilizations that stack and tower like the Roman Empire. When the first seagrass arrived here about 30 million years ago, they found the perfect landscape. Plants grow best in shallow water closest to light.
