To kick off the 2025 UNFCCC Climate Week in Panama, The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew), a co-executing partner of the PROCARIBE+ Project hosted a workshop for representatives of regional governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector, featuring best practices and key lessons for integrating blue carbon coastal wetlands in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) from countries in the wider Caribbean region. On the margins of Climate Week, Pew also advanced plans to assist Panama in implementing their NDC commitment to fully map seagrass ecosystems in the country’s waters by 2027.
The workshop was an opportunity for governments to learn and share with regional counterparts that have experience with the inclusion of coastal wetlands in their national climate commitments.
Coastal ecosystems, including mangroves, seagrass meadows, and salt marshes play a critical role in climate action by sequestering and storing large amounts of “blue carbon.” NDCs represent each country's efforts to reduce national emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. In this sense, PROCARIBE+ aims to expand the integration of coastal and marine capital – particularly blue carbon– into the 2025 NDC updates in the countries of the wider Caribbean Region, and in particular, in Belize, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica and Panama. To achieve this, PROCARIBE+ has partnered with The Pew Charitable Trusts, who will be working closely with PROCARIBE+ countries to support their efforts to integrate blue carbon ecosystems in NDCs 3.0. Under the partnership, Pew will also help regional knowledge-sharing by disseminating best practices from NDCs that effectively incorporate marine and coastal natural capital. This will be done through selected platforms and targeted forums to encourage scaling and replication of the process, and strengthening linkages between NDCs and other marine conservation and planning processes.
As part of the PROCARIBE+ project and in close collaboration with Panama’s Ministry of Environment and research partners, Pew will support a series of research activities on seagrass extent and carbon stock analysis on Panama’s Caribbean coast. This work has the objective of developing enabling conditions in the country for the establishment of innovative financing instruments in support of coastal wetland conservation.
Visit procaribeplus.org to find out more about the commitment of the PROCARIBE+ Project of Protecting and Restoring the Ocean’s natural Capital, building Resilience and supporting region-wide Investments for sustainable Blue socio-Economic development. For more information on how the project is supporting the development of NDCs, please visit the National Determined Contributions webpage.
Read the following article to find out more about the Pew’s partnership with The PROCARIBE+ Project here.
