Securing Blue Carbon Accounting: A Cryptographic Framework for Coastal Ecosystem Monitoring

Blue carbon ecosystems have significant long-term carbon sequestration capacity, making them an important nature-based solution for climate change mitigation. However, monitoring and accounting processes are increasingly dependent on distributed IoT sensors, satellite remote sensing, and cloud-based analytics platforms. This growing digitalization exposes the blue carbon data lifecycle to risks such as tampering, unauthorized access, and loss of data provenance. A compliance-aware cryptographic framework is presented to secure blue carbon accounting throughout the end-to-end process, from in situ measurement to carbon credit verification. In contrast with generic IoT–blockchain architectures, the framework binds sensing devices to national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) identities and produces audit-ready cryptographic evidence aligned with Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) workflows. The design employs the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to ensure authenticity and non-repudiation, Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) encryption for confidentiality, a hash-chained log for ordered integrity, and Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) for privacy-preserving validation. Experimental results under simulated attacks (n = 50) demonstrate a 100% detection rate across the evaluated tampering scenarios, while maintaining an average IoT-layer cryptographic latency below 10 ms and a blockchain throughput of 145 transactions per second, exceeding the requirements for continuous ecosystem monitoring. These findings indicate that strong lifecycle-wide cryptographic guarantees can be achieved without imposing prohibitive computational overhead.