Colette Wabnitz (UBC) and Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre) are guest editors this month for a special issue on Ocean Finance in the journal Marine Policy. As part of the issue, they write about how “funding for ocean conservation and sustainable fisheries” is rapidly changing and evolving beyond “official traditional assistance (ODA) and philanthropy”. Some of topics of papers in the issue include ODAs for fisheries and aquaculture, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Spain, market-based finances for blue carbon ecosystems, and marine conservation funding flows. Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) also contributes with a paper on funding fisheries projects under the climate change regime, and Colette and Robert et al. write about transparency and coherence in funding for fisheries and the ocean.

In their paper on ocean financing, Colette and Robert discuss different types of existing and evolving funding for sustainable fisheries and ocean conservation – ODAs, philanthropy, blue carbon investment and various climate funds – and introduce readers to the papers that focus on each of the topics listed above. They further describe “new and emerging areas for ocean finance”, China’s role as a major investor in ocean projects (pledging $60 billion USD in aid and loans over three years for projects on the Asian continent) and the current US administration’s unconventional policy of using ODA as a “transactional tool”.

Reference:

Wabnitz, C. & Blasiak, R. (2019). The rapidly changing world of ocean finance. Marine Policy, 107, 103526. link