Ocean Visions has launched a new digital roadmap that outlines priorities for unlocking decarbonization across multiple sectors through seaweed.
The Seaweed-Based Products for Decarbonization road map represents a first-of-its-kind digital tool designed to help guide the responsible development and scaling of seaweed-based products that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from multiple industries.
Seaweed has the potential to play an important role in global decarbonization by replacing petroleum-based ingredients in a variety of products. Unlike conventional, emissions-intensive products, seaweed grows rapidly without many of the typically required inputs, such as freshwater, land, and fertilizers.
The publication highlights that even though seaweed aquaculture is already a major global sector catering to food production and hydrocolloids, the scaling of seaweed-based products for decarbonization, such as biofuels and biostimulants, will require a substantial expansion, as well as refined technologies and processes to cultivate, harvest, and handle biomass efficiently.
In the roadmap, Ocean Visions outlines the scientific, economic, technological, and policy steps needed for seaweed-based products to contribute meaningfully to global decarbonization.
The resource is centered around five key sectoral opportunities: agricultural uses, biomaterials, critical minerals, food products and animal feed, and biofuels.
It combines expert insights on scientific readiness, and it looks into the engineering and production challenges, as well as the financing and market barriers, environmental and social considerations, and policy and governance needs.
Ocean Visions specifies that the digital roadmap is an evolving resource that will be updated regularly as the seaweed sector experiences advances in science, technology, markets, and policy.
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This initiative is part of Ocean Vision’s broader mission of advancing ocean-based pathways for decarbonization. The roadmap was created with input from an advisory board that included Ling Cao (Xiamen University), Peter Green (Hatch Blue), Rod Fujita (formerly of the Environmental Defense Fund), and Simon Freeman (Wetstone, formerly of the ARPA-E Mariner program).
Ocean Visions CEO Brad Ack shared, “Seaweed is full of climate promise. This road map provides the foundation for a shared understanding of opportunities, constraints, and priority actions to accelerate the sustainable production of seaweed-based products.”
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