Coastal Futures: Are investors all at sea?
Coastal Futures: Are investors all at sea?
Early this month our oceans specialist Tanya Cox attended the Coastal Futures event to discuss current and future maritime-related issues. Here are some of her personal reflections on the event:
I recently had the pleasure of being submerged in two days of ocean talk at this year’s Coastal Futures event. My favourite kind of talk.
This year, 25 years on from the inaugural event, the theme centred around “the path to 2030” because 2025 is a pivotal year for the Ocean, marking the halfway point in both the UN Decade of the Ocean and the UN Decade of ecosystem restoration.
The event kicked off with some thought-provoking timelapse modelling offered by Google Earth, highlighting the world’s changing seascape over the past 50 or so years. The imagery was stark – coastlines and polar regions have changed dramatically. But perhaps the most striking to me was the images of what Central London, New York and Tokyo – now awash with shiny high-rises and pioneering architecture – stand to experience in the coming years if we don’t double down on climate action and adaptation.
The packed Coastal Futures agenda offers a snapshot of hot topics on the mind of UK stakeholders which this year included regulators, government ministers, academics, philanthropic funders and civil society groups. Themes ranged from growing a sustainable blue economy; sharing lessons learnt and fostering inclusive, equitable decision making to restore nature and promote ocean stewardship.
I went to Coastal Futures with two clear objectives:
To reconnect with the science and coastal practitioners; and
To identify what businesses and investors were doing to support the much-needed transition to the blue economy.
It is the latter where I was disappointed with the outcome: representatives of the finance industry were noticeably absent.
Businesses across the UK are reliant on the ocean and the services that it provides – both directly and indirectly. Without a deep understanding and appreciation of this across financial institutions, will we ever transition to a sustainable blue economy? On numerous occasions during panels and the ensuing debates, there was broad acknowledgement that private finance was needed to support nature-based solutions that will restore vital habitats and ecosystems and support adaptation in the face of a changing climate and seascape.
What can investors do to change this?
Immerse yourself – find out how ocean health is relevant to your portfolio and what dependencies exist for your assets.
Keep your ear to the…shell – there is immense knowledge being shared across the marine and coastal community to support informed decision-making.
We’re all in the same boat – adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change can’t stop at the coastline. It needs to include the ocean to be effective.
This marked my first time back at Coastal Futures in seven years. Have things moved forward? Are we seeing solutions to some of the most pressing challenges the ocean faces? I have thought long and hard about these questions and whilst some of the conversation felt very familiar to me there was a new energy to the discussion.
Rather than view the ocean as the final frontier, we need – and are starting to see - changemakers to pave the way in restoring society’s relationship with the ocean because at the end of the day, it costs businesses a lot less to avoid potentially irreversible impacts to the ocean that it will to compensate for them in the future.
Perhaps the loudest message across all panels was the simplest: we are out of time for incremental change. Act for the short term, yes, but not at the cost of the long-term. As one delegate so eloquently phrased it: “we need to move from seek to prove mode and embrace a move to improve our seas mode.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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For more information or to start your own ocean dialogue with Tanya Cox, please reach out: tanya.cox@chronossustainability.com
Image: Courtesy of Coastal Futures