India’s climate ambition is constrained by unaccounted coastal carbon; integrating blue carbon ecosystems into the NDC is essential to unlock measurable mitigation, coordinated governance, and climate finance
Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must decline by 55 percent relative to 2019 levels by 2035 to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Although this target requires countries to optimise their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to unlock all viable mitigation pathways, the global outlook remains concerning. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) 2025 NDC Synthesis Report indicates that current communicated commitments would cut emissions by only 17 percent below 2019 levels by 2035, far short of the 1.5°C target, signalling the need to identify and integrate all underutilised mitigation pathways into national climate strategies.
One such underutilised lever is Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCEs), which sequester carbon at higher rates per unit area than many terrestrial forests. The Asia-Pacific alone holds approximately 51 percent of the world's mangroves and a quarter of its seagrass meadows. However, the integration of BCE into NDCs across the region remains limited by data gaps, overlapping institutional mandates, and funding constraints. India is one such country. Despite holding an estimated 67 teragrams of carbon in its mangrove ecosystems alone, however, these stocks remain disaggregated in its NDC, limiting finance and policy traction.
Despite holding an estimated 67 teragrams of carbon in its mangrove ecosystems alone, however, these stocks remain disaggregated in its NDC, limiting finance and policy traction.
Countries worldwide, including Brazil, Costa Rica, Australia and the United States, have begun integrating BCEs into their climate strategies. India’s evolving climate ambition, reflected in its 2035 NDC, signals a broader willingness to deepen its commitments. However, countries like Indonesia, which have progressively expanded their NDC architecture to include BCEs, offer a more relevant model, demonstrating how regulatory integration can advance both climate finance and institutional coherence and provide actionable lessons for India’s future NDC revisions.
With over 108,000 km of coastline and an estimated 17 percent of the world’s blue carbon reservoir, Indonesia is a globally significant sink for coastal carbon. The governance of these ecosystems spans multiple ministries, including the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF), the Ministry of Forestry, and the Ministry of Environment, with the National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS) co-leading the alignment of NDC commitments with national development plans. Yet Indonesia has coordinated its institutional efforts to embed BCEs across its NDC framework and inter-ministerial climate strategies, resulting in measurable outcomes. Notably, its ‘i-Mangrove Blue Carbon Dashboard’, a Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) dashboard, tracks 12.24 MtCO₂e of annual mitigation potential from mangrove ecosystems, to support NDC delivery with IPCC-consistent data.
Indonesia's Second NDC (2025) includes mangroves in the national GHG inventory within the Forestry and Other Land Use (FOLU) Net Sink 2030 target, while simultaneously advancing seagrass toward future NDC integration. Under this nationally binding target, Indonesia's FOLU sector’s GHG absorption must equal or exceed sectoral emissions by 2030.
The absence of a dedicated blue carbon target in India’s NDC has led to an estimated 67.35 teragrams of coastal carbon stocks remaining unaccounted for, limiting targeted climate finance and performance-linked accountability.
To identify the coastal zones that contribute to this goal, Indonesia has developed a layered governance and policy architecture. Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) regulations designate blue carbon reserve zones within national marine plans, anchoring them as a supporting instrument for NDC delivery. A complementary carbon pricing framework establishes the basis for emissions trading and results-based payments, enabling blue carbon removals to be linked to both domestic and international carbon markets. Further, the marine-sector regulation extends this compliance structure to coastal ecosystems, formally integrating the MMAF into a cross-sectoral mitigation framework alongside land-based agencies.
Together, these instruments create a vertically integrated policy system: the NDC sets the mitigation mandate, spatial planning anchors protective zones to achieve it, and carbon pricing creates a financial incentive to sustain conservation outcomes.
India's NDC (2031–2035) raises its land-sink ambition but subsumes all sequestration within a single forest and tree cover target of 3.5 to 4.0 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. This target is operationalised through the National Mission for a Green India, under India's National Climate Action Plan. The Mission includes mangrove restoration as a coastal protection measure without a dedicated carbon sequestration target for BCEs. The absence of a dedicated blue carbon target in India’s NDC has led to an estimated 67.35 teragrams of coastal carbon stocks remaining unaccounted for, limiting targeted climate finance and performance-linked accountability.
Structural deficiencies explain the lack of coastal carbon in the NDC. Despite existing legal instruments and fragmented regulations, NDC integration stalls without cross-institutional alignment. In India, 24 ministries are involved in blue economy governance, yet none operate within a shared blue carbon framework.
India’s governance system generates regulations, datasets, and management plans across separate mandates, with no accountability chain from a defined blue carbon NDC target for coordinated implementation.
The 2021 Blue Economy Policy draft, which still awaits formal enactment, acknowledges the absence of an overarching coordinating authority. The downstream effect of this gap was documented by the 2022 Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), citing delayed coastal management plans and weak state-level implementation. Consequently, India’s governance system generates regulations, datasets, and management plans across separate mandates, with no accountability chain from a defined blue carbon NDC target for coordinated implementation.
Learning from Indonesia's design can help India bridge this gap. A partial equivalent to Indonesia's blue carbon reserve zones already exists in India. The Coastal Regulation Zone notification designates mangroves as no-development zones without explicitly classifying them as mitigation hotspots within NDC targets. A statutory MSP framework could expand those zones into blue carbon sites, formally integrated into India’s mitigation accounting.
Indonesia's Second NDC has already integrated marine spatial protection into its mitigation commitments, allowing protected coastal zones to function as recognised components of national emission-reduction pathways. While both countries are developing frameworks for blue carbon trading, Indonesia formally places its marine authority within the carbon market architecture, creating a verified channel from restoration to NDC accounting. India has an approved mangrove offset methodology, but lacks a structured mechanism to channel large-scale government mangrove restoration schemes, such as MISHTI, into NDC-linked carbon accounting or market-based crediting systems. A dedicated coastal sink target in India's next NDC could trigger this unification, making coastal authorities, restoration implementers, and carbon market administrators jointly accountable to the climate commitment.
Area-based, time-bound emission-reduction targets could potentially enable results-based blue climate finance. Costa Rica's NDC demonstrates that a named 2020 blue carbon commitment triggered a National Blue Carbon Strategy and facilitated World Bank support to pilot a marine Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) model, in which participants receive US$ 2,698.85 annually, roughly 2.5 times their typical income, tied to verified conservation activities. In contrast, India's MISHTI scheme provides wage-based employment for mangrove plantation activities but lacks an equivalent performance-linked payment mechanism. Underdeveloped policy frameworks constrain the scaling of India’s coastal PES. A clearly defined BCE target within the NDC could thus provide the policy anchor to enable such mechanisms and attract aligned climate finance.
A statutory MSP with explicit blue carbon reserve designations must spatially define coastal zones and anchor them within the carbon market, creating a direct channel from conservation to market participation. However, this channel cannot function without resolving the underdeveloped GHG baselines, which lack standardised MRV protocols, making credit issuance premature. MRV development and market methodology must therefore advance in unison, verifying ecosystem baselines first and then scaling credit issuance as data quality and spatial coverage improve, providing market integration from the start.
The Apex Committee for Implementation of the Paris Agreement (AIPA), with its inter-ministerial membership and authority over NDC reporting and carbon market regulation, provides a ready institutional foundation to anchor BCEs. The Philippines’ National Blue Carbon Action Partnership, embedded within its environment ministry and administered by a multi-stakeholder body, validates this model. It recently launched the National Blue Carbon Roadmap, integrating coastal ecosystems into climate targets—a framework that India must replicate to make blue carbon institutionally accountable.
Such a cell must address three structural gaps: i) the absence of a unified framework for blue carbon projects; ii) the risk of credit double-counting across coastal and terrestrial schemes; and iii) the lack of coordinated oversight to accelerate the development of coastal GHG baselines and MRV systems.
The National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM) and National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR) must jointly administer such a cell, with rotating representation from coastal states and civil society, to ensure technical rigour. Accountability must be mandated through quarterly reports on time-bound blue carbon targets submitted to AIPA, ensuring continuous oversight.
For India and the wider Global South, which host highly concentrated blue carbon ecosystems, the opportunity to enhance mitigation at scale is immense. Embedding blue carbon within formal climate frameworks, with robust regulatory mechanisms and clear accountability, will be critical to strengthening restorative finance and ecosystem protection.
Insha Rupani is a Research Intern at the Observer Research Foundation.
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