The Ocean Finance Handbook is a guide to support an increase in finance flowing towards the sustainable blue economy, published recently by Friends of Ocean Action. The Handbook provides a key resource to enhance understanding of finance for a healthy ocean and generate conversations between financial institutions and marine-based businesses, conservation professionals and ocean project managers.
The Ocean Finance Handbook offers a guide to a range of funding options for sustainable ocean-based industry and marine conservation. Numerous opportunities are currently emerging that promise financial as well as social and environmental benefits – that are in urgent need of finance. In parallel, significant new opportunities for private investment are becoming available due to innovative new financing models and instruments.
“The sustainable blue economy is emerging as a key element of humanity’s resilient future. It is therefore important that we create a better understanding of what is involved in investing in the sustainable blue economy. The Ocean Finance Handbook aims to get the ocean and finance communities onto the same page when we’re talking about this investment. It guides our moves towards ocean resilience and recovery, towards encouraging public-private partnerships, and the necessary innovations for capital to flow at scale into the sustainable blue economy.
As the world grapples with the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the sustainable blue economy is a vision of hope for a better blue-green future,” said Ambassador Peter Thomson, UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean and Co-Chair, Friends of Ocean Action.
The aim of The Ocean Finance Handbook is to foster a shared understanding, to ensure all stakeholders are speaking the same language for a sustainable blue economy. The report sketches out the different sectors of the blue economy outlines pre-requisites and co-requisites for funding and discusses the types and sources of capital and investment models that currently exist. Case studies in the report help illustrate what impact investing, parametric insurance, using philanthropic capital, seed investment and bond issuances mean in practice.
