Blue carbon ecosystems provide a wide range of ecosystem services, are critical for maintaining marine biodiversity and may potentially serve as sites of economically viable carbon dioxide removal through enhanced organic carbon storage. Here we use biogeochemical simulations to show that restoration of these marine ecosystems can also lead to permanent carbon dioxide removal by driving ocean alkalinity enhancement and atmosphere-to-ocean CO₂ fluxes. Most notably, our findings suggest that restoring mangroves, which are common in tropical shallow marine settings, will lead to notable local ocean alkalinity enhancement across a wide range of scenarios. Enhanced alkalinity production is linked to increased rates of anaerobic respiration and to increased dissolution of calcium carbonate within sediments. This work provides further motivation to pursue feasible blue carbon restoration projects and a basis for incorporating inorganic carbon removal in regulatory and economic incentivization of blue carbon ecosystem restoration.

蓝碳生态系统提供广泛的生态系统服务，对于维持海洋生物多样性至关重要，并可能通过增强有机碳储存成为经济上可行的二氧化碳去除场所。在这里，我们使用生物地球化学模拟来表明，这些海洋生态系统的恢复也可以通过提高海洋碱度和大气到海洋的 CO _{2来永久去除二氧化碳}通量。最值得注意的是，我们的研究结果表明，恢复热带浅海环境中常见的红树林将导致在各种情况下显着提高当地海洋碱度。增强的碱度生产与厌氧呼吸速率的增加和沉积物中碳酸钙溶解的增加有关。这项工作为追求可行的蓝碳恢复项目提供了进一步的动力，并为将无机碳去除纳入蓝碳生态系统恢复的监管和经济激励措施奠定了基础。