Context: A project of restoring Seagrass meadows has recently been started in the Baltic Sea to tackle climate change.

About Seagrass Meadows

• It is an underwater ecosystem formed by seagrasses.

• They are flowering plants with stems, seeds, pollen and long green, grass-like leaves.

• They have roots and rhizomes which anchors them in seafloor sand.

• The meadows act as natural sinks that can store millions of tonnes of carbon.

• Seagrasses store more than twice as much carbon than rainforests.

• They have reduced sharply over the last century due to worsening water quality.

• Seagrasses are also ecosystem engineers, which means they alter the ecosystem around them, adjusting their surroundings in both physical and chemical ways.

• Seagrasses prevent erosion of the seafloor to the point that their presence can raise the seafloor.

• They contribute to coast protection by trapping rock debris transported by the sea.

• The plants also help support fisheries and protect coasts from erosion.

Re-Greening the Sea

• Europe had lost about one-third of its seagrass areas between the 1860s and 2016, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up global warming.

• The SeaStore Seagrass Restoration Project in Kiel, enable citizens to restore the plants.

• It is run by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research of the United Nations.

• The ultimate goal of this is to scale the conservation programs to re-green the Baltic Sea.

• The seagrasses that are resilient to rise in temperature were also studied.

• The seagrass breeds more heat-resistant strains as these cannot move to cooler areas of the ocean.

New methods for Re-greening

• The process of planting flowering seagrass to harvest seeds and experiment with planting them are done.

• This is a less laborious process.

• It is a very long and tedious process that requires many divers to plant shoots to restore all the lost seagrass in the Baltic Sea.

About Baltic Sea

• The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain.

• The Baltic Sea is connected by artificial waterways to the White Sea via the White Sea–Baltic Canal and to the German Bight of the North Sea via the Kiel Canal.