Protecting Seagrass through Payments for Ecosystem Services: A Community Guide

This community guide presents a structured overview of how community-based conservation can be applied to protect seagrass ecosystems through Payments for Ecosystem Services mechanisms. It explains the ecological importance of seagrass meadows, emphasizing their roles in supporting fisheries, reducing coastal erosion, and storing significant amounts of carbon in sediments, while also documenting the scale and drivers of global seagrass loss. The document situates seagrass conservation within the context of climate change and highlights gaps in existing legal and institutional protection. It outlines the rationale for community-led management, detailing governance, financial planning, scientific capacity, community engagement, benefit sharing, and legal rights as core requirements. A substantial portion is dedicated to explaining Payments for Ecosystem Services, with particular attention to carbon-based approaches, including principles such as permanence, leakage, and additionality. The guide describes project design, monitoring, certification, reporting, and market participation, supported by a case study from coastal Kenya. Overall, it functions as a global, non-prescriptive reference intended to guide communities and project developers in designing viable, accountable seagrass conservation initiatives linked to measurable ecosystem service outcomes.