Healthy natural coastal ecosystems, such as mangrove forests, saltwater marshlands and seagrass meadows provide a vast array of important co-benefits to coastal communities around the world, including throughout the Arabian Peninsula. These benefits include ecosystem services such as a rich cultural heritagethe protection of shorelines from stormserosion or sea-level risefood from fisheriesmaintenance of water qualityand landscape beauty for recreation and ecotourism. In a Blue Carbon context these ecosystems also store and sequester potentially vast amounts of carbon in sediments and biomass.