Assessing the Impact of Future Sea Level Rise on Blue Carbon Ecosystem Services on Long Island, New York

Abstract

Salt marsh ecosystems provide critical climate mitigation ecosystem services through carbon sequestration. Sea level rise (SLR) has variable effects on these ecosystems, both driving marsh migration into upland areas and causing inundation and erosion that reduces marsh extent. How salt marsh carbon sequestration responds to SLR thus represents an important carbon cycle feedback to climate change. Here, we examine the consequences of one meter (1 m) of SLR for salt marsh ecosystem carbon sequestration for Long Island, New York and for the North Fork peninsula in far northeastern Long Island using three different assumptions for salt marsh carbon sequestration rates. For the entirety of Long Island, SLR will reduce future carbon sequestration by 22 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2100 under the medium sequestration rate assumption compared to a no-SLR scenario. This represents a net loss of $137.5 billion in carbon sequestration ecosystem service value due to SLR. On the North Fork peninsula, however, SLR increases sequestration by 370,000 tons of CO2 with a medium sequestration rate assumption relative to a no-SLR scenario. However, the magnitude of uncertainty in future carbon sequestration due to different assumptions of carbon sequestration rates is greater than the impact of SLR on carbon sequestration, pointing to the need for the use of field-based measurement of sequestration rates in managing coastal ecosystem response to climate change.