Generating emission removals through ARR activities is but one goal of the BlueMX Aztlán Blue Carbon Project's holistic mission to stimulate local economies, celebrate and preserve cultural heritage, and foster opportunities for marginalized peoples to safely and autonomously participate in sustainable development. Such developments can be characterized using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Indicators set out by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Mangrove restoration and canal rehabilitation activities will not only conserve and restore ecosystem services, but also directly employ members of participating communities, resulting in short-term increases to the net income of project area households. Project activities that involve trainings, workshops, and programming to promote conservation awareness, alternative livelihoods and productive land use best practices also aim to produce more long-term and equitable increases to net income for participating landowners and resource users across.

Project programming will also include political and inter-institutional coalition-building activities aimed at overcoming institutional barriers to sustainable resource management and increasing the representation of social landowners (i.e., members and governing bodies of Ejidos and comunidades), women, ethnic and racial minorities, and other marginalized peoples whose voices are typically underrepresented in the decision-making process that governs environmental and land use regulations within the project region. These political and institutional campaigns will also seek to elevate community campaigns for improved municipal waste management across the project region.

Together, these project activities are expected to contribute to the following SDG targets:

Table 5. Expected SD Contributions from Project Activities (SDG Goal | SDG Target | Expected Contributions from Project Activities | Achieved by the first monitoring event?):

SDG 1 No Poverty - Target 1.2: Decreasing the proportion of the project area population living below the national poverty line through short- and long-term increases to net household incomes driven by local employment opportunities with BlueMX to implement proposed project activities. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: Yes
SDG 2 Zero Hunger - Target 2.3: Increasing the productivity of small-scale and historically marginalized food producers through political advocacy and inter-institutional partnerships to normalize sustainable resource and land planning across the productive and supporting economic sectors of the project region. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: No
SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth - Target 8.3: Supporting productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, and the formalization of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises through alternative livelihood and productive best practices trainings, workshops, and programming with participating landowners and resource users. Also, employment opportunities via regular restoration activity implementation and maintenance. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: No
SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth - Target 8.9: Promoting policies for sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products through ecotourism workshops and trainings and through political and institutional coalition-building to normalize environmental and developmental regulations for tourism. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: No
SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities - Target 11.6: Reducing adverse environmental impacts of cities by supporting community-driven clean-up campaigns and advocacy for municipal waste management. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: Yes
SDG 13 Climate Action - Target 13.2: Mitigating GHG emissions through restoring aboveground and belowground carbon pools of mangrove habitat, which remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. These will be quantified via a statistically robust monitoring system, which is explained in the PD section 4 and will be quantified regularly through VCS monitoring reports. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: Yes
SDG 14 Life Below Water - Target 14.4: Better regulating unsustainable and destructive fishing practices through inter-institutional coalition-building with fishing cooperative societies and regulatory agencies to normalize sustainable fishing practices. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: No
SDG 15 Life on Land - Target 15.1: Undertaking wetland conservation and restoration actions through passive and assisted mangrove regeneration promoted by activities to rehabilitate hydrological connectivity between mangrove forests and surrounding tidal hydrology. This is expected to restore forest area as a proportion of total land area and enhance biodiversity in intertidal mangrove wetland systems. | Achieved by the first monitoring event: Yes

Furthermore, the Project directly advances Mexico's nationally stated environmental, social, and economic development priorities. Progress against these priorities is tracked through the project's non-carbon monitoring framework. At the national policy level, the project is fully aligned with Mexico's Updated Nationally Determined Contributions (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) & Instituto Nacional de Ecologia y Cambio Climatico, 2022), which explicitly commit to a National Blue Carbon Strategy to protect and restore mangroves, seagrass beds, and saltmarshes as priority carbon reservoirs under both mitigation and adaptation objectives (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) & Instituto Nacional de Ecologia y Cambio Climatico, 2022). The project further aligns with Mexico's mid- to long-term climate goals under the National Environmental Restoration Program (PNRA) 2025-2030 (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT), 2025), which targets restoration of 30% of degraded coastal and marine ecosystems by 2030 with priority on mangroves.

The project contributes directly to PNRA indicators, including hectares of priority ecosystem restored, involvement of local Ejido and indigenous communities, and biodiversity recovery, through hydrological restoration and direct replanting activities across the five participating Ejidos and communities in Nayarit. At the social and economic level, the project advances nationally recognized sustainable development priorities by creating direct local employment for members of participating ejidos/communities (SDG 1.2), supporting sustainable livelihoods and ecotourism development (SDG 8.3, SDG 8.9), improving environmental conditions in underserved coastal communities through waste management campaigns (SDG 11.6), and building the capacity of historically marginalized social landowners to engage meaningfully in natural resource governance and policy (SDG 10). These contributions are monitored and reported throughout the project's 40-year longevity period via the non-carbon monitoring framework described in section 5.3, which includes SMART indicators for social safeguards, ecological restoration success, and community engagement outcomes. Data are compiled on a continuous, monthly, annual, and multi-year basis and reviewed at each VCS monitoring event, ensuring that the project's contributions to Mexico's sustainable development priorities are systematically tracked, documented, and reported in accordance with VCS requirements.

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