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The seaside bays of Virginia’s Eastern Shore are home to some great plains — but not the kind you can see driving by.
From South Bay east of Cape Charles to Hog Island Bay farther north, fields of seagrass stretch for more than 9,000 acres.
They provide underwater shelter and food for a host of marine critters such as crabs and mussels, and help to clear up the water.
Virginia scientists have worked over the past two decades on a massive restoration of these grasses that were once lost because of disease. It’s one of the most successful programs of its type in the world.
The coalition now hopes to highlight a particular advantage: the grasses’ ability to fight climate change by storing carbon otherwise released into the atmosphere.
Officials with The Nature Conservancy, the University of Virginia and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science under William & Mary are working with the state to launch the first carbon credit program linked to seagrass. It would allow anyone to purchase credits to offset carbon emissions, with the money feeding back into research and management.
“We should be pretty proud in Virginia that we have worked to establish this really large restoration site that now will be the first blue carbon seagrass project in the world,” said Jill Bieri, director of the Conservancy’s Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve. “We’re showing how to do it.”
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Blue carbon is the term for carbon captured in coastal and ocean ecosystems, such as mangrove forests and tidal marshes, according to the National Ocean Service. It’s a form of what’s called carbon sequestration when carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere and stored in things like soil and trees. This is a natural process.
But too much carbon dioxide is circulating in the atmosphere and warming the planet; investing more in sequestration as a potential solution is gaining international attention.
Seagrass meadows, in particular, are good at taking up and storing carbon in the seabed, where it decomposes much more slowly than on land, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Most of the carbon gets stored in the sediment, where it could theoretically stay indefinitely.
Although seagrass accounts for less than half a percent of the world’s oceans, they sequester about 10% of the carbon buried in ocean sediment, according to the international Blue Carbon Initiative.
Eelgrass off the Eastern Shore had disappeared in the 1930s, said Chris Patrick, director of the submerged aquatic monitoring and restoration program at VIMS.
A wasting disease decimated about 90% of seagrass in the Atlantic Ocean at that time. Bad storms then killed off what remained.
Then in the ‘90s, scientists noticed a small patch of eelgrass that had popped up naturally, perhaps from a seed that traveled down from Maryland, Patrick said.
“It got people thinking: maybe the grass can be returned to the area.”
A VIMS team started testing some grass plots close to the patch. For the past quarter-century, officials then embarked on a strategic recovery, including planting seeds and conducting research. The grasses have expanded to the roughly 9,500 acres today.
“It’s just been one of the most remarkable recovery stories of seagrass in the entire world,” Patrick said, including the length of time the project’s been running.
The environmental conditions had been ripe for the plant, it turned out. There were just no seeds to jump-start growth.
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The Virginia blue carbon exchange would offer credits on an open market to buyers interested in offsetting carbon emissions.
Airlines or other companies for which emissions are a necessary part of business often look to offset their emissions by buying carbon credits, for example.
Such programs have been around for years, more commonly with forests, helping save them by paying for their preservation.
Virginia lawmakers passed a law allowing a blue carbon market for aquatic plants in 2020, the same year they voted to join the much larger and well-known Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The law says revenue would be used for more monitoring and research.
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But carbon credits have to be precisely calculated, and that can be tough.
That’s what a U.Va. team led by professor Karen McGlathery has been working on for years.
To sell carbon credits, an organization must show that a project is sequestering carbon that would not have been otherwise.
“That’s one of the challenges with this carbon marketing,” said McGlathery, the lead of the university’s long-term ecological research program based on the Shore. “There are some projects out there not actually verifying that they’re sequestering carbon.”
The Virginia group’s been working to verify its program through a third-party organization called Verra. The protocol Verra uses is based on McGlathery’s research.
Her team worked to refine calculations that take into account not just measuring carbon in seagrass soil but also the rate at which it builds over time, how much is taken up by the plants, other greenhouse gas emissions like methane and more.
The 9,500 acres won’t all be available for credits. Only a specific subset of the grasses — those restored within the past five years — will go into the program.
McGlathery estimated the credits would go for something along the lines of $50 per metric ton, heavily dependent on demand. “We’re not talking millions of dollars,” she said.
“It’s more about proof of concept,” Bieri said. “And I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people who will be very interested in the very few credits that we will have to sell because it is showing that seagrasses have this great capability to store carbon.”
The partners also hope the program will draw attention to the importance of seagrass in general.
It’s unclear exactly when the market would launch. Bieri said a 30-day public comment period that’s part of the verification process should happen by spring’s end.
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The state owns the land where the seagrass resides.
The Conservancy entered a cooperative agreement with the Department of Environmental Quality and Virginia Marine Resources Commission in September that outlines how to move forward. It lasts through 2055.
The parties agree on “the ecological and economic values of submerged aquatic vegetation and the benefits of promoting and incentivizing the expansion” of it in the state’s coastal waters, the agreement reads.
Sharon Baxter, director of DEQ’s division of environmental enhancement, said in an email the team is focused on the validation process. Officials haven’t yet “discussed anything more specific in terms of the sale of the carbon offsets.”
There are a lot of firsts involved, McGlathery said.
“It’s the first time that it’s really been done the right way. So this is really an opportunity to learn from that and make it viable for other places and other people to do the same thing.”
Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner@pilotonline.com