Kelp forests get a lot of credit these days as climate allies: they draw down carbon dioxide, store some of it, and have inspired a fast-growing restoration movement aimed at bringing damaged forests back. A new synthesis in PLOS Biology, published September 8, 2026 by Karen Filbee-Dexter of the University of Western Australia along with Albert Pessarrodona, Kira Krumhansl and Thomas Wernberg, asks a simple but pointed question: is restoration actually keeping pace with what’s being lost? Their answer, after pulling together the best available global data, is no, not even close.
Rather than running new experiments, the team combined existing measurements of kelp forest extent, how much carbon kelp locks away, and records from restoration projects around the world to compare the two sides of the ledger. What they found is a staggering mismatch: climate-driven kelp loss is erasing carbon-storage capacity somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times faster than restoration efforts can put it back. In other words, every hard-won restored kelp bed is being offset many times over by forests quietly dying off elsewhere from warming water, storms and other stressors.
The imbalance shows up clearly in how much ground restoration has actually covered. Since the very first kelp restoration project back in 1958, the total area successfully restored worldwide adds up to a modest patch of ocean, while the authors project that climate change could strip away an area of kelp forest thousands of times larger than that by 2050. Restoration projects are also expensive and labor-intensive, which limits how quickly they can scale even where they work well.
The authors are careful not to dismiss restoration itself: bringing back a lost kelp forest still helps local biodiversity, coastal protection, and nearby carbon storage, and they note that both their loss and restoration estimates carry real uncertainty, since global kelp maps are incomplete and long-term restoration outcomes vary a lot from site to site. But their broader point is about priorities: if kelp’s role as a climate solution matters, protecting the forests still standing has to come first, because right now no amount of replanting can outrun the pace of loss.
Further reading: Filbee-Dexter, K. et al., “Seaweed carbon removal cannot keep up with climate-driven loss,” PLOS Biology (2026).