Dr Siti Maryam Yaakub is protecting Singapore’s shores through our seagrass meadows

Long before seagrass, the marine meadows that capture carbon and cradle ocean life, drew million-dollar pledges or blue carbon shaped climate agendas, there was a girl who simply loved the sun, sea and science.

“I liked the water and swimming,” says Siti Maryam Yaakub, now senior director of the International Blue Carbon Institute (IBCI) in Singapore. “When I was 14, we visited my aunt in Sabah. We did the mountains first, and I didn’t enjoy that. But then we went to one of those beach resorts, and that was the first time I snorkelled. It was amazing.”

That sun-soaked moment nudged her inner compass towards the sea. Decades later, she is one of the world’s most respected voices in blue carbon conservation – bridging marine science, policy and grassroots inclusion to help rewrite the future of climate solutions.

A sea-sparked childhood

Born to a journalist father and a teacher mother, Siti grew up surrounded by books, language, and long drives to Malaysia’s coastlines. She pored over encyclopaedia entries on the ocean, and read about Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle. At a seminar her mother once attended, marine biologist Leo Tan mentioned that he had started out in the same field. That was all the permission her parents needed to support a path less taken.

While studying marine biology at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, she encountered seagrass during a lab practical. Something clicked. Seagrasses aren’t algae – they’re rooted, flowering lifeforms that bloom quietly beneath the sea. “They’re actual plants,” she says. “And there’s something beautiful about these underwater meadows.”

The ocean’s blind spot revealed and the birth of Team Seagrass

She was just an undergraduate helping out with prize-giving duties at a seagrass conference in 2004 when her name was unexpectedly called. Her poster, compiled from samples collected at Labrador Park, Chek Jawa Wetlands and beyond, had won the student award. “I didn’t even know I’d been entered,” she laughs. But the real prize was clarity. “Scientists were asking, ‘You mean there’s still seagrass in Singapore?’ It was then that I realised there’s a bigger blind spot to fix.”

In 2005, she selected coral reef fish for her honours thesis. “They felt like the sexy topic,” she says. But the call of seagrass studies tugged harder.

In 2006, while facing a tough job market, Siti turned to volunteering with the local nature community. There, she connected with Ria Tan, who runs WildSingapore, a grassroots website dedicated to documenting and protecting Singapore’s coastal biodiversity. They didn’t expect much from a one-off survey at a seagrass-rich Sentosa shore, which made the strong turnout all the more surprising. What began as a thoughtfully planned outreach effort soon grew into TeamSeagrass in 2007, a citizen science programme supported by NParks and linked to a global monitoring network.

Today, its long-term data supports Singapore’s national restoration efforts.

“I was getting pegged as the ‘seagrass girl’, even though I was a broad-based marine biologist,” she recalls. The label stuck, and in hindsight, helped open doors and anchor her niche.

Turning data into decisions

In the middle of that year, Siti joined NParks as a marine biodiversity manager, where she gained a clearer understanding of the science-policy interface in coastal and marine ecosystem management, especially through tools like environmental impact assessments (EIAs).

In 2009, she began her PhD at NUS, focusing on how human pressures affect resilience of tropical seagrasses with field sites in Singapore and Indonesia. “There wasn’t even a carbon methodology for seagrass,” she recalls. But something gnawed at her. “Publishing is important,” she says. “But who’s reading it beyond scientists?”

After submitting her thesis in January 2014, she joined environmental consultancy DHI Water & Environment in April as a senior marine ecologist, where she worked for nearly a decade. “One of the first things I tackled was how much sediment corals and seagrasses can ‘tahan’ before they start to die.” Her work helped inform dredging thresholds and permit conditions. Towards the end of her time there, she pivoted to blue carbon, helping companies assess ecosystem carbon storage.

Still, she felt the limits of consulting. “You’re usually brought in after decisions are already made. I wanted to work upstream,” she says.

Building the International Blue Carbon Institute

In 2023, she joined Conservation International to help establish IBCI in Singapore – a global hub focused on closing scientific gaps, building capacity, and forming strategic partnerships to scale blue carbon – not just to prove concepts, but to implement them.

IBCI also supports countries in incorporating blue carbon into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. It does so by building capacity in policy makers and producing guidelines, manuals and policy briefs to inform their decision-making.

Seagrass remains a frontier. “We know far less about how they reproduce, which is key for restoration. And we’re still learning how reliably they store carbon.” She notes their “charisma deficit”, explaining that they don’t compete with corals for beauty, funding or attention. “But if you want blue carbon at scale, you need capital, patience, and a high tolerance for uncertainty, especially at the early stages of the project.”

Singapore’s restoration moment and the heart of conservation

Singapore is now three years into its first seagrass restoration pilot, backed by nearly $1 million in private funding, and led by NParks and NUS. The effort is critical: More than 45 per cent of the country’s seagrass meadows have been lost in the last 50 years.

Globally, Indo-Pacific meadows fringing Singapore and Malaysia are among the most powerful carbon sinks, with average stocks of 86 tonnes per hectare. “These ecosystems have been doing the work for millennia,” she says. “It’s only now that we’re starting to respect that.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that conservation must centre people, not exclude them,” says Siti.

She advocates for inclusive restoration that uplifts women, often invisible in climate planning despite their dependence on coastal ecosystems. “In many communities, women harvest from mangroves and meadows, while men fish offshore. Only the men show up at town halls, and that skews decisions.”

In June 2025, IBCI hosted a gender workshop to co-develop inclusive strategies for blue carbon conservation. “We didn’t want it to be a footnote,” she says. “It had to shape the conversation, because blue carbon ecosystems are very gendered spaces in many coastal communities, and women play a focal role in activities like gleaning for both food and raw materials.”

What tomorrow holds for blue carbon

From Singapore outward, her sights are on restoration blueprints, marine protected areas, and scalable monitoring frameworks. At home, the NParks-led pilot continues to seed learnings. TeamSeagrass still runs. The EIA course she started is now taught by others.

But the mission remains.

“I’d like to see Singapore lead, not just in tech or finance, but in coastal restoration, blue carbon policy and conservation science,” she says. “We have the networks, the expertise, the capacity.”

And personally? “I just want to make sure the science I do doesn’t sit on a shelf. It should feed into something more – policy, action, empowerment, community. That’s the reason I’m still in this space, despite all of the climate anxiety that it comes with.”

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Photography Clement Goh
Art direction Adeline Eng
Hair & makeup Benedict Choo, using Nars