Indonesia and five other countries within the Asia and Pacific regions have announced that they would propose their marine and coral reefs should be taken into account as a carbon sink within the climate change protocol.

On the sidelines of the U.N. climate change conference here Thursday, officials from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands underlined the importance of the coral triangle area’s absorption of around 245 million tons of carbon per year to the world’s survival, The Jakarta Post reported on Friday.

Indonesian Fisheries and Marine Affairs Minister, Freddy Numberi, who opened the six countries’ senior official meeting to discuss the action plan to conserve the coral area, said that the area, which is dubbed as the Amazon of the Seas because it contains 53 percent of the world’s coral reef and over 3,000 fish species, was the earth’s epicenter of marine life and diversity.

“We have made efforts to conserve it during the past five years, so we want the world to appreciate it. One of the ways is to include it into the Kyoto Protocol framework so that it can be turned into a carbon sink, and later trade it for carbon credit,” Freddy told reporters.

The first meeting of senior officials from the six countries will come up with what will be known as the Coral Triangle Initiative that will outline concrete actions to preserve the coral reefs and how it will be financed.

The officials will meet with their counterparts from Australia and the U.S., two countries that have expressed an interest to help finance the initiative.