Coastal ecosystems such as seagrass meadows, salt marshes and mangrove forests are valuable to humans in many ways. In particular, they store carbon - and do so with a much higher surface density than forests, for example. They thus make an important contribution to mitigating climate change. Australia's coastal ecosystems alone, which absorb a particularly large amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, save the rest of the world climate-related costs of around 23 billion US dollar a year. This is according to calculations just published by researchers at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), GEOMAR Helmholtz-Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel University (CAU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).