Everyone Wants Blue Carbon Credits; Almost Nobody Can Deliver Them

The entire history of blue carbon credit issuance would not satisfy the annual offset requirement of a single large airline preparing for CORSIA Phase 1 compliance in 2028.

By March 2025, fewer than 7 million blue carbon credits had ever been brought to market globally. Out of 94 registered blue carbon projects worldwide, only 10 were actively issuing credits. That is the sum total of what the blue carbon market has produced after more than a decade of development.

Meanwhile, the S&P Global Platts Blue Carbon benchmark hit record highs in 2025. Corporate buyers are competing for supply that barely exists. The Mangrove Breakthrough, endorsed by 48 governments representing approximately 40 percent of the world’s mangrove coverage, has set an ambition to mobilise USD 4 billion to protect and restore 15 million hectares by 2030. Over USD 750 million in mangrove-positive investments has been tracked since 2020, and a new Mangrove Finance Facility is being established to catalyse further capital flow.

But the price is irrelevant if the credits do not exist. And right now, they barely do. The question that matters is not what blue carbon is worth. It is why, after years of growing demand and political momentum, supply remains stuck at a fraction of its potential.

The standard explanation is incomplete

The usual answer is that blue carbon is a young market. There are not enough projects, the methodologies are at early stages, and supply will catch up as the sector matures. This is true but circular. It does not explain why supply has remained so constrained when there is no shortage of mangroves, no shortage of buyer demand, and no shortage of capital looking for deployment.

The world has approximately 15 million hectares of mangrove forest remaining. Current blue carbon projects cover just over two million hectares, representing roughly 15 percent of what exists and only two percent of the full estimated potential for blue carbon projects globally. Mangrove projects account for 99 percent of all estimated greenhouse gas reductions from blue carbon. The ecosystem is there. The science demonstrating its carbon value is established. The political architecture through the Mangrove Breakthrough and the Global Mangrove Alliance is in place.

So the bottleneck is not the ecosystem. It is not the money. It is not the science. It is what happens between them.

What building a blue carbon project actually requires

Having spent the past 3years developing blue carbon projects across coastal Malaysia, from feasibility through to Project Design Document (PDD) submission under the methodology authored with Cercarbono, one thing is clear. The distance between identifying a mangrove site and delivering a verified carbon credit is vastly longer, more complex, and more expensive than most market commentary acknowledges.

The pipeline begins with community engagement and the establishment of carbon rights. In most Southeast Asian and African jurisdictions, the legal framework for who owns the carbon stored in coastal ecosystems is either ambiguous, untested, or simply does not exist. Before a single tonne of CO2 can be quantified, a developer must navigate land tenure, indigenous and local community consent, benefit-sharing agreements, and in many cases, the creation of entirely new legal instruments to establish that a project entity has the right to develop and commercialise carbon credits from a given mangrove site. This process alone can consume 12 to 18 months and requires legal, social, and political competence that most project developers do not possess.

Once carbon rights are secured, the technical pipeline begins. Satellite-based baseline analysis across a minimum of 10 years of imagery is required to establish historical land use change, degradation trends, and reference emission levels. This is not a desktop exercise. It demands expertise in remote sensing, geospatial computation platforms, and the scientific judgement to distinguish real degradation signals from sensor noise, cloud interference, and tidal artefacts that are endemic to coastal environments. Getting this wrong does not just produce a bad map. It produces a flawed baseline that contaminates every subsequent calculation in the PDD.

Field inventory follows, and this is where the reality of blue carbon development diverges most sharply from the tidy diagrams in market reports. Carbon stock quantification requires physical measurement of above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, dead organic matter, litter, and soil organic carbon across stratified sampling plots. For a mangrove site of 10,000 hectares or more, this means deploying teams into tidal environments that are physically demanding, logistically complex, and expensive to access. The data must then be reconciled with satellite-derived estimates, a process that invariably reveals discrepancies. In my experience, it is not unusual to produce three independent carbon stock estimates for the same site using different methodological approaches, each defensible, each different. Resolving these discrepancies requires scientific judgement, not a formula, and the integrity of the final credit calculation depends on getting it right.

The PDD is where most developers discover the true complexity of methodology compliance. A PDD for a coastal wetland project under a rigorous methodology framework is not a form to fill in. It is a technical document that must demonstrate baseline quantification, additionality, permanence, leakage assessment, uncertainty analysis, monitoring plans, community engagement evidence, and a 30-year emission reduction projection with every figure traceable and every assumption justified. A single PDD can run to 100or 300 pages of dense technical content, and producing it requires simultaneous competence in carbon science, geospatial analysis, community development, and regulatory compliance.

Validation by a third-party Verification and Validation Body (VVB) adds further time. There are fewer than a dozen VVBs globally with demonstrated competence in blue carbon. The queue for validation can add 6 to 12 months to a project timeline, and the process itself often generates findings that require the developer to revise and resubmit.

From feasibility to first credit issuance, the realistic timeline for a well-resourced blue carbon project is three to five years. For projects in jurisdictions with undeveloped carbon rights frameworks, it can be longer. This is why supply is stuck. Not because nobody wants to build blue carbon projects, but because building them properly takes capabilities, patience, and integration that the sector has not yet developed at scale.

Three structural bottlenecks

Beyond the sheer length and complexity of the development pipeline, three structural issues hold blue carbon supply below its potential.

1. The blue carbon rights problem. In many tropical countries, mangroves sit on land governed by overlapping jurisdictions involving forestry departments, marine authorities, state governments, indigenous land claims, and community use rights. Until a developer can establish a clear, legally defensible right to develop carbon credits from a given area, no PDD can be finalised and no validation can proceed. National governments that are serious about unlocking blue carbon supply need to create clear blue carbon rights frameworks, not as an afterthought to broader carbon market regulation, but as a foundational prerequisite. The Mangrove Breakthrough’s ambition of protecting and restoring 15 million hectares by 2030 will not be realised if developers spend two years per project navigating legal ambiguity before they can begin the technical work.

2. The integration gap. The blue carbon development pipeline requires expertise in community engagement, geospatial analysis, field ecology, carbon accounting, methodology compliance, financial modelling, and registry processes. In most projects today, each of these capabilities sits with a different party. The community engagement is done by one NGO, the satellite analysis by a consulting firm, the field inventory by a university, the PDD by a specialist writer, and the validation by a VVB that has never visited the site. Each handoff introduces delays, misalignments, and errors that compound across a multi-year development cycle. The developers who are able to deliver blue carbon credits at the standard the market now demands are those who have integrated these capabilities under one roof, reducing the handoff points and maintaining end-to-end accountability from methodology to monitoring. The sector has very few such developers. Building more of them is not a matter of training programmes or capacity building workshops. It is a matter of recognising that blue carbon project development is an integrated discipline, not a sequence of outsourced tasks.

3. The VVB bottleneck. The global capacity for independent validation and verification of blue carbon projects is far below what the pipeline requires. This is a solvable problem, but it requires the carbon crediting programmes and their accreditation bodies to actively expand the pool of qualified auditors with coastal wetland competence. Every month of validation delay is a month of credits that do not reach the market, a month of revenue that does not flow to communities, and a month in which the gap between demand and supply continues to widen.

What would actually unstick supply

The Mangrove Breakthrough has mobilised political will and significant capital commitments. Forty-four governments have endorsed it. Over USD 750 million has already been tracked in mangrove-positive investments, and a new Mangrove Finance Facility is being designed to unlock further capital at scale. But capital commitments will not translate into credits on the market unless the development capability exists to convert hectares into verified emission reductions. This is the missing link between ambition and delivery.

Unsticking blue carbon supply requires action on three fronts simultaneously. National governments must establish clear blue carbon rights frameworks that give developers and communities legal certainty to proceed. The sector needs more integrated developers who can own the full pipeline from community engagement to credit issuance, rather than fragmenting it across a chain of subcontractors who have never met each other. And VVB capacity must expand to match the growing pipeline of projects entering the validation queue.

None of these are financing problems. They are capability and governance problems. And until the sector confronts them directly, the pattern will persist. The prices will eventually rise, reports will celebrate the growth in demand, conferences will convene panels on the blue carbon opportunity, and the communities who steward the world’s remaining mangrove forests will continue to wait for the capital that everyone agrees they deserve.

The ecosystems are there. The demand is there. The science is there. The finance is mobilising. What is missing is the operational machinery to connect them. That is what the next phase of this market must build.

Malaysia has over 630,000 hectares of mangrove forest, among the largest in Southeast Asia and globally significant in blue carbon terms. We have practitioners developing projects on the ground, a methodology authored by a Malaysian developer for a globally recognised standard, state-level carbon frameworks emerging in several states such as Sarawak and Johor, and a growing community of researchers, policymakers, and indigenous stewards who understand what is at stake. What we do not yet have is a national platform that brings all of this together with the political will to match.

48 governments have endorsed the Mangrove Breakthrough. Brazil, Pakistan, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and others have committed their mangrove estates to a global framework that connects conservation ambition to finance and accountability. Malaysia is not yet among them. It should be. Our mangroves, our communities, and our practitioners are ready. What we need is the political signal that says this country is serious about blue carbon, not as a talking point, but as a national development priority with the governance infrastructure to deliver it.

Norita Ja’afar is Director of Tabah Asiaand author of Cercarbono’s CM-LU-CW-001 Blue Carbon Methodology for Mitigation of Climate Change in Coastal Wetlands. She is Country Leader of the Global Mangrove Alliance Malaysia Chapter and Chair of the Johor State Carbon Credit Development Mechanism Task Force. As a Sustainability Practitioner, she also serves as Independent Director for Public Listed companies and Financial Institution in Malaysia.