… "It is absolutely sensible to be creating more salt marsh in Britain, but the primary benefits are for flood defenses and for wildlife," he said. "Carbon sequestration should be seen as a secondary or tertiary benefit."
The impact may be more meaningful elsewhere. In North America and in Australia, in particular, the marsh is almost "like peat," Dr. Smeaton said, and therefore traps carbon at a far greater rate. "They can draw down crazy amounts," he said. "And mangrove is a thousand times better."
Perhaps that is why there has been such international interest in the experiment at Steart. Ms. Laver has given talks in Canada and in South Korea. The site has even hosted delegations from the Netherlands, a place that knows a thing or two about holding back the sea.
Steart is often described as a "rewilding" project, but Ms. Laver prefers not to use that term. The terrain has been returned to nature but it has been engineered by human ingenuity and curated by human hands.
"Looking after the site requires a lot of intervention," Ms. Laver said, sheltering from a brief, furious rain squall in a bird blind. Through a window, we surveyed a landscape that was still, but ever-changing; natural, but human-made; new, but as it once was.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/europe/uk-steart-marshes-carbon-climate-change-flooding.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=bth&pvid=F435DA27-C3EC-4FA8-B781-A3229D34AC54
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