Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance
News
Welcome to an Earth Day special bulletin of the ORRAA News. This Earth Day, we are celebrating a raft of exciting announcements from this past month:
BREAKING: On Earth Day 2024, Salesforce unveiled that ORRAA has been selected to participate in the Salesforce Accelerator – AI for Impact on climate action. The Accelerator will support ORRAA’s collaboration with Investable Oceans to develop “The Octopus Desk” – a global blue finance marketplace using AI to improve matching investors with projects and identification of project sites.
We’re thrilled to have been selected by Salesforce as part of their AI for Impact Accelerator to develop The Octopus Desk. The support we receive from Salesforce around responsible AI use, data strategy and technical architecture, combined with their project funding, will help us make strides towards delivering it.
Earlier this month at the Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore, Temasek Trust, DBS Foundation and UBS Optimus Foundation announced their strategic partnership to build Co-Axis, a pioneering digital marketplace dedicated to catalytic capital. ORRAA is a project partner, with PescaData, one of our Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge winners selected as one of the impactful initiatives featured on the platform.
PescaData fish registration app
Meanwhile, in Athens last week…
To mark the start of the Our Ocean Conference in Greece, ORRAA’s Executive Director, Karen Sack, partnered with the UN High-Level Climate Champions and Race to Resilience to underscore the critical need for investments into a regenerative and sustainable blue economy – vital for tackling the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Read the full blog here.
During Our Ocean, ORRAA with the Minderoo Foundation and Callund Consulting hosted a “Blue Bond Breakfast” to discuss the outcomes of the feasibility study that we undertook on the value-add of establishing a specialist “one-stop-shop” Blue Bond Incubator (BBI) to accelerate and defragment investment at scale into a regenerative and sustainable ocean economy. Our research shows a median potential investment of USD$550 billion per year to 2030, in six regenerative and sustainable blue economy sectors, with a potential for the BBI to facilitate the structuring of USD$70 billion by 2030.
UN Special Envoy for the Ocean, Peter Thomson and the Greek Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Oceans and Coordinator of the “Our Ocean 2024” Conference, Dr. Dionysia-Theodora Avgerinopoulou, both attended and spoke to the importance of accelerating the development of blue bonds to deliver coastal resilience, for climate stabilisation and to regenerate blue nature. Join us in the co-design and next steps of the BBI by sending a note to secretariat@oceanriskalliance.org. Learn more here.
The BBI is part of the first wave of financial instruments developed under the Sea-Change Impact Financing Facility (SCIFF). For the latest summaries on each component, click on the links below:
ORRAA team on the ground at Our Ocean in Athens
ORRAA Executive Director, Karen Sack (right side) speaking at a Our Ocean side event “From Greece to Nice” in Athens
ORRAA also announced that over USD$1m has been committed to fund three new ORRAA projects thanks to the governments of Canada and the UK:
- Environment and Climate Change Canada is supporting Save the Waves to develop a parametric insurance product and surf ecosystem resilience trust fund in El Salvador to compensate coastal communities for revenue loss from the impacts of climate change. This builds on a concept phase supported by ORRAA through its Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge (ORIC).
- The UK’s Blue Planet Fund will support:
- Coast 4C’s work in the Philippines to deliver regenerative seaweed farming to enhance the resilience of climate vulnerable coastal communities in and around MPAs, enhance MPA management, and inform the development of new financial products.
- WaterAid Nigeria’s work with the Lagos State Partnership for Coastal Resilience Initiative, a public-private partnership, to build a consultative platform that enhances community capacity and develops innovative and sustainable nature-based solutions to improve coastal resilience.
Hot on the heels of Our Ocean, we attended the Commonwealth Ocean Ministers Meeting in Cyprus, which saw us partnering with the Commonwealth Blue Charter (CBC) to highlight innovative financial solutions, working towards the formation of a Commonwealth Blue Finance Working Group that will feed into the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting later this year in Samoa.
ORRAA Innovation and Scaling Director, Ariane Steins-Meier with UK Minister of State for Climate, Environment and Energy of the United Kingdom, Lord Benyon at the Commonwealth Ocean Ministers meeting in Cyprus
Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Baroness Scotland speaking at the Blue Economy Finance Ministerial Roundtable alongside Commonwealth Ocean Ministers meeting in Cyprus
And finally, in Washington D.C., on the margins of the World Bank Spring Meetings, ORRAA and USAID, the US Department of State and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hosted a ‘deal room’ looking at “Investing in a Sustainable Blue Finance Marketplace.” We brought together project developers and investors, sparking collaboration, highlighting opportunities for financing and showcasing best practice for making investments in the blue finance space.
ORRAA Executive Director, Karen Sack (right side) speaking alongside USAID Chief Climate Officer, Gillian Caldwell at an ORRAA/USAID event “Investing in a Sustainable Blue Finance Marketplace” at the World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington D.C.
Should you have anything that you would like us to add to the next newsletter, please send it to secretariat@oceanriskalliance.org. Please also let us know if you have any questions or would like to set up a call to catch up.
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