The contribution of blue carbon to our efforts to tackle climate change has only recently been widely recognised, especially in the policy landscape - as such our evidence base is still evolving, but we are already recognising where actions on the ground, such as nature based solutions for coastal adaptation & restoration projects, are leading to blue carbon gains. As such, I think the balance is moving in parallel - acting on the evidence we have it, while still filling the gaps. I think we face 2 big challenges - the first is developing our evidence base and actions around restoration to a level where we can easily move from standalone projects & pilots to embedding opportunities across day to day work. And secondly how to we marry up actions for carbon storage and sequestration with wider work around habitat condition, resilience & climate change. Actions that focus only on maximising carbon storage/sequestration without taking the wider ecosystem context into account are less likely to be sustainable, or make meaningful contributions in the long term.

Thanks Clare, its great to hear the report has been useful! For us it has provided the baseline inventory we needed to raise the profile around of the Welsh marine environment in climate change discussions and has been a great starting point to work towards understanding how our plans, projects, programmes and decision making could increase blue carbon opportunities. I think a blue carbon recovery plan is a really interesting idea, and would lead to other co-benefits for Welsh marine ecosystems. One of the key questions i think is how we integrate increasing blue carbon / blue carbon recovery with other aspirations for our marine environment such as resilience and condition improvement. Ultimately they are all woven together and improving one will improve the others.

Thanks for the question Matt! I think all opportunties should be scoped out and explored, including options such as geo-engineering. However, I think its really important that we don't lose sight of the wider picture - with human interventions such as geo engineering (i.e. large scale interventions in natural systems to counteract climate change), we need to consider not just the impacts on carbon storage and sequestration, but also what other impacts on marine ecosystems might there be and what the risks are to undermining the resilience and condition of systems - which ultimately make any natural carbon storage and sequestration processes sustainable in the long term.