Discussions of valuable but threatened ocean ecosystems often focus on coral reefs or coastal mangrove forests. Seagrass meadows get a lot less attention, even though they provide wide-ranging services to society and store lots of climate-warming carbon.

But the findings of a new University of Michigan-led study show that seagrass ecosystems deserve to be at the forefront of the global conservation agenda, according to the authors. It’s the first study to put a dollar value on the many services—from storm protection to fish habitat to carbon storage—provided by seagrasses across the Caribbean, and the numbers are impressive.

Using newly available satellite data, the researchers estimate that the Caribbean holds up to half the world’s seagrass meadows by surface area, and it contains about one-third of the carbon stored in seagrasses worldwide.

They calculated that Caribbean seagrasses provide about $255 billion in services to society annually, including $88.3 billion in carbon storage.In the Bahamas alone, the ecosystem services provided by seagrasses are valued at more than 15 times the country’s 2020 gross domestic product, according to the study published online June 21 in the journal Biology Letters

.“Our study is the first to show that seagrass beds in the Caribbean are of global importance in their areal extent, in the amount of carbon they store, and in the value of the economic services they provide to society,” said study lead author Bridget Shayka, a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

“The findings underscore the importance of conserving and protecting these highly threatened and globally important ecosystems, which are critical allies in the fight against climate change.”

One way to prioritize seagrass conservation would be to include those verdant undersea meadows in global carbon markets through projects that minimize loss, increase areal extent or restore degraded beds.

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