Kelp forests are vanishing twice as fast as coral reefs and four times faster than tropical rainforests. An estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of kelp forests worldwide have been lost or significantly degraded in the last 50 years. These precipitous declines typically received far less scientific scrutiny than higher-profile ecological crises. But kelp has gradually been getting more attention as scientists and the environmental community come to recognize the value of the carbon that coastal ecosystems, including kelp forests, can capture. A 2023 literature review of more than 180 papers that examined the potential for kelp to store carbon suggested that the climate benefits of these underwater forests are “grossly underestimated,”. Much of the carbon that kelp sequesters ends up being released back into the marine environment in the form of leaf litter (kelp, which is a macroalgae, has leaflike structures called blades that are its organs of photosynthesis.) This detritus is typically ingested by fish and other marine organisms and excreted in a matter of days. Still, a small percentage of it ends up in the deep ocean where it remains for centuries, or even millennia. Roughly 62 million tons of carbon is carried into the deep ocean by coastal currents each year, according to two studies published in 2024. The people of the world and their governments need to support projects to support kelp populations worldwide. Among other projects, these are key to bot preserving biodiversity and climate stability for future generations.