The development of a new global finance ecosystem designed to channel finance into coastal and ocean natural capital by 2030 is underway, it was announced at the One Ocean Summit hosted by France.
The initiative, led by the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), has convened representatives from the private sector, governments and NGOs to advance the development of the new framework including AXA, Bank of America, Palladium, WWF and WTW.
Even though the Ocean is changing more quickly now than at any time in the past 65 million years – less than 1% of climate finance is invested into marine and coastal Nature based Solutions. The Sea Change Impact Finance Facility (SCIFF) is being developed to address the need for a new open architecture for ocean investment at scale and ORRAA is working with leading financial institutions to design a new, commercially-managed framework.
Also announced at the summit, European public banks pledged €4bn of ocean finance by 2025. The public finance commitment was led by the European Investment Bank (EIB), France’s development agency and Germany’s KfW development bank, under the existing Clean Oceans Initiative. The Initiative was already working to raise €2bn of finance by 2023 and used the Summit to announce an ambition to double that amount by 2025.
To date, the Initiative has provided €1.6bn. It funds projects working to tackle the most pressing sustainability issues facing the oceans, including the mismanagement of plastics and wastewater, and estimates that more than 20 million people have benefitted from the projects supported to date. Funding is provided globally – not just to projects in Europe – with a focus on regions grappling with issues like a lack of waste management infrastructure.