First seagrass restoration in Britain will capture carbon rapidly and offer habitat for lost marine life

UK's lost sea meadows to be resurrected in climate fight

Damian Carrington in Dale Bay, Pembrokeshire

Tue 10 Mar 2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 10 Mar 2020 10.35 GMT

“We think this whole bay was once carpeted with seagrass,” says Evie Furness, waving across the sparkling, sunlit waters of Dale Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The underwater meadow is long gone though, a victim of past pollution and shipping. So from a boat half a mile from shore, Furness is feeding a long rope into the water, which carries a little hessian bag of seagrass seeds every metre. “We’ve passed the 800,000 seed mark now,” she says.

The Seagrass Ocean Rescue project will ultimately place 20km of rope and a million seeds on the shallow seafloor, where they will sprout through the bags and restore the habitat.

Seagrass meadows were once common around the UK coast, but more than 90% have been lost as a result of algae-boosting pollution, anchor damage and port and marina building. The meadows, however, store carbon 35 times faster than tropical rainforests and harbour up to 40 times more marine life than seabeds without grass, facts that are driving the effort to bring them back.

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