In 2025-2026, Papua New Guinea published a roadmap, New Zealand studied the conditions for a possible mechanism, and Australia pursued the expansion of indigenous protected areas. Papua New Guinea published a blue carbon policy roadmap; New Zealand was studying the conditions for a future mechanism; Australia has more than 108.5 million hectares of terrestrial land and more than 6.8 million hectares of marine area in indigenous protected areas. This transfer of rights modifies the structure of incentives: a community holding a legal right over an ecosystem acquires a direct proprietary interest in preserving it, distinct from external subsidies.
The essentials
- Papua New Guinea published a blue carbon policy roadmap in 2025; New Zealand was studying the rights and tools necessary for a future blue carbon system.
- Australia has more than 108.5 million hectares of terrestrial land and more than 6.8 million hectares of marine area in indigenous protected areas; several new IPAs were created in 2026.
- The central mechanism: legal title transforms conservation from an external obligation into a direct economic interest for the managing community.
- Real tension: voluntary blue carbon markets remain volatile and verification frameworks vary unevenly across countries.
- Perspective: if carbon markets hold and legal rights expand, this model could extend to other tropical regions with significant coastal ecosystems.
Blue carbon: a resource long without an owner
Without an identifiable rightsholder, no actor had an interest in absorbing the cost of continuous surveillance or in resisting the pressures of short-term coastal development. Conservation subsidies could cover part of this cost, but they remained conditional on external priorities and budget cycles that were out of sync with ecological timescales. A coastal ecosystem degrades over decades and restores over the same periods: no intermittent incentive mechanism can accompany this time scale coherently. This mismatch between ecological horizon and external funding horizon fundamentally distinguishes legal title from a subsidy, however generous.
Mangroves, seagrass meadows, and coastal marshes store carbon at a rate well above terrestrial forests, up to five times more per hectare according to Conservation International estimates. But for decades, these ecosystems have floated in a legal void: too marine to fall under terrestrial property law, too coastal to fit into classic fishing regimes. No one owned them. No one therefore had an interest in ensuring their continuity.
This void had measurable consequences. Oceania has lost a significant portion of its mangroves since the 1980s, owing to the combined effects of intensive aquaculture, coastal development, and rising sea levels. The loss of mangroves results in the release of stored carbon, with significant effects on climate and on coastal communities that depend on these areas for fishing and storm protection.
The question was not resolved by major climate conferences. It is beginning to be resolved by a reverse movement: entrusting management to those who have inhabited these spaces for generations.
Papua New Guinea and New Zealand: two different legal architectures
Papua New Guinea and New Zealand have progressed differently in structuring blue carbon, through distinct paths that reflect their respective political structures and legal traditions.
In Papua New Guinea, the roadmap relies on legal recognition of customary ownership. More than 97% of the country’s land falls under customary regime. The roadmap envisions blue carbon mechanisms and projects with community participation and benefit-sharing mechanisms. It is an architecture that capitalizes on what already existed, rather than imposing an external framework.
In New Zealand, the path went through the Treaty of Waitangi and the institutions that flow from it. The recognition of Māori rights over coastal and marine areas, the rohe moana, has a long history of claims and negotiations. A 2024 ministerial report recommends developing guidance on coastal carbon rights and exploring regulatory tools. Conservation International Aotearoa accompanied several iwi in implementing pilot projects for mangrove sequestration.
Both approaches link ecosystem governance to the rights and participation of indigenous communities. Papua New Guinea relies on the existing customary regime; New Zealand is still studying the rights and tools necessary.
Australia bets on scale: 31 million hectares and five new coastal areas
Australia represents the most advanced case in volume. With more than 108.5 million hectares of terrestrial land and more than 6.8 million hectares of marine area in Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), the country has built over decades a network that today constitutes a substantial part of the national conservation system.
In 2026, several new IPAs were proclaimed, including coastal zones. These zones include mangroves, seagrass meadows, and fringing reefs in the north of the country, where marine biodiversity is most dense and indigenous communities most present. Country guardians, indigenous rangers, ensure surveillance, restoration, and scientific documentation of these areas. Their work is funded by a federal program, but the envisioned governance structure associates communities and customary owners with a framework co-piloted by public authorities.
This model has a virtue that conventional reserves do not always have: local legitimacy. Indigenous communities know these territories over multiple generations. They possess ecological knowledge that standard scientific inventories struggle to capture. And they have a long-term interest in preservation, since these areas constitute their territory, their food resource, and their heritage.
Federal funding remains essential, it would be imprudent to downplay it, but the indigenous governance structure gives it a resilience that purely exogenous projects generally do not have.
Legal title changes the logic of incentives
Here is the central mechanism, and it deserves to be examined. Classical conservation policies often function on a model of prohibition or compensation: certain uses are prohibited, or communities are compensated for forgoing exploitation of a resource. This model creates a permanent tension between conservation value and use value, and when external funding dries up or government priorities shift, conservation can retreat quickly.
Legal title transforms this equation. A community that holds a recognized right over a coastal ecosystem is no longer in a position of compensated renunciation. It is a manager of a resource whose economic value, in carbon credits, fishing, tourism, ecosystem services, is linked to the state of conservation of the ecosystem.
It is a transformation in the nature of the incentive, not only in its intensity. Work by the World Resources Institute documents that indigenous lands secured by legally recognized rights show deforestation rates lower than comparable non-indigenous lands.
This logic also connects to a broader debate on nature protection: recent studies show that poorly delimited sensitive areas can generate significant collateral damage, which argues for locally adapted and adaptive governance models rather than perimeters imposed from outside.
Carbon markets: a real resource, risks not to be minimized
Blue carbon accesses voluntary carbon offset markets, where companies seek to offset their emissions by financing sequestration projects. For indigenous communities, these markets represent a potentially significant source of revenue, provided credits are verified, prices stable, and intermediaries reliable.
On these three points, the situation is mixed. Verification is the strongest point: both Verified Carbon Standard (Verra) and Gold Standard have protocols specific to blue carbon, and several projects in Oceania are already certified. The carbon price is more problematic: voluntary markets experienced turbulence between 2023 and 2025, with a significant correction following revelations about the quality of certain forestry projects. Intermediaries, project developers who negotiate between communities and buyers, play a role that deserves particular attention regarding benefit-sharing.
The consultations conducted in Papua New Guinea and New Zealand are studying ways to address this risk. By anchoring legal title with the community, this framework proposes to limit dependence on intermediaries: a recognized managing community has greater leverage in marketing carbon credits. But the robustness of this protection depends on the quality of legal implementation and communities’ capacity to negotiate favorable contracts, which requires legal and technical support that not all yet receive.
A regional model seeking international coherence
Oceania is experimenting, but within a still fragmented international framework. Blue carbon credits do not yet have clear status under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which governs carbon markets between states. This ambiguity complicates the valuation of projects and their recognition in national accounts.
By 2040, if indigenous legal rights expand and carbon markets find a more solid architecture, this model could spread to other tropical regions—the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma, the coasts of Micronesia, estuaries in West Africa—everywhere indigenous peoples manage coastal ecosystems without formal legal title. The ICCA Consortium, which documents territories and areas conserved by indigenous peoples on a global scale, lists several hundred zones that could be candidates for such a regime.
The condition is not technical. It is political: the capacity of states to establish clear legal frameworks, ensuring rights, effective participation, and equitable benefit-sharing for indigenous communities. Oceania offers three variants of response to this condition. What other regions will do with it remains open.
Who, in governments and international organizations, has the means to document the first measurable effects of these legal frameworks—mangrove deforestation rates, carbon revenues per community, area restored—and make it a basis for replication? That is perhaps where the real scope of this experiment will be decided.
Sources
- IWGIA, Indigenous World 2026: Papua New Guinea
- IWGIA, Indigenous World 2026 (general report), International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs
- ICCA Consortium, Territories of Life: 2021 Report (documentary database on conserved indigenous territories)
- Conservation International Aotearoa, blue carbon projects in New Zealand (New Zealand Conservation International official website)
- World Resources Institute, Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change (2015, reference report on indigenous land rights and conservation)
- Paris Agreement, Article 6, carbon market mechanisms between states (UNFCCC)
