Regenerate, Then Return. The Ocean's New Economy

In June 2024, during London Climate Action Week, Leaders on Purpose hosted Marisa Drew, then Chief Sustainability Officer of Standard Chartered, for the launch of Towards a Sustainable Ocean: Where There's a Will, There's a Wave.

The title stayed with me. Because it captured something that was only beginning to become visible at the time. The ocean was no longer only a story of risk, fragility, and loss. It was becoming a frontier for innovation, finance, resilience, and value creation.

The report made a clear case. A sustainable planet depends on a sustainable ocean. The ocean regulates our climate, supports livelihoods, enables global trade, and underpins food security for billions of people. The WWF values its economic assets at more than $24 trillion. Yet investment in ocean solutions remained far below the scale of that opportunity.

That gap is now beginning to close. The blue bond market has roughly tripled in the past five years, and issuance more than doubled again between 2024 and 2025. The number of funds investing in the blue economy has climbed from around two dozen a decade ago to more than 160 today. The signals of serious capital are no longer anecdotal.

The institutions are moving too. In June 2025, the third UN Ocean Conference convened in Nice, and the Blue Economy and Finance Forum that preceded it in Monaco drew leaders, investors, and development banks who committed more than ten billion dollars in new pledges. That was still a fraction of what the ocean ultimately needs, but it marked a shift. Ocean finance is no longer a side conversation among specialists.

Across the blue economy, a growing universe of solutions is emerging: ocean-based carbon removal, blue carbon, marine ecosystem restoration, sustainable aquaculture, ocean monitoring, pollution prevention, renewable energy, and sustainable shipping, alongside new financial instruments capable of mobilizing capital at scale.

What unites them is more interesting than their variety. These are not companies that draw value out of the ocean. They are companies that put value back into it, and the restoration is the product. They strengthen the systems they depend on rather than depleting them, and they earn precisely because they do. This is a different kind of company, and a different kind of return.

This is where the conversation becomes important for business leaders and investors.

The ocean is not simply an environmental concern. It is part of the operating system of the global economy. It touches food systems, supply chains, energy, infrastructure, climate stability, and geopolitical resilience. As ocean science improves, as data becomes more credible, and as governance frameworks mature, the conditions for serious capital are beginning to form.

There is a sharper way to see this, recently argued in the World Economic Forum: the extractive model does not only deplete the ocean, it misprices it. Markets still value ocean-dependent businesses as though the fisheries, reefs, and coastlines beneath them were permanent, even as those assets quietly degrade. By UNEP's accounting, more than seven trillion dollars flowed into activities that draw down nature in 2023, against roughly two hundred billion supporting it. That is not a stable foundation. It is risk that has not yet been

written down, and we have seen before what happens when a market ignores the losses sitting in plain sight on its own books. The regenerative companies matter for that reason too. They are not only doing less harm. They are priced for a world the market has not finished repricing.

At Leaders on Purpose, we have spent the past decade working with CEOs and senior leaders on how business responds when the old assumptions no longer hold. Again and again, the leaders who shape the future are the ones who recognize value before the market has fully priced it. They understand that a company aligned with the health of the system it operates in is not accepting a discount on its returns. It is building the more durable kind.

The ocean is one of those places now.

During London Climate Action Week 2026, we are convening a small Blue Capital Dinner at Six Senses London with investors, family offices, scientists, and leaders working at the frontier of ocean finance. The evening will be anchored by Gigablue, one of the most remarkable ocean organizations I have encountered. Their work in verified ocean carbon removal points to a larger shift. Ocean-based solutions are moving into the realm of serious, measurable climate infrastructure, where the act of restoring the ocean becomes something that can be trusted, priced, and funded at scale.

That shift will require discernment. The opportunity ahead is to design ocean finance with integrity: grounded in science, supported by credible measurement, attentive to communities, and aligned with the long-term health of the systems we all depend on.

We have been talking about the ocean as a place where regeneration and returns meet for some time. Now the wave is building. The question is whether capital, science, policy, and leadership can move together quickly enough to meet it. Where there's a will, there's a wave. Now there is real capital behind it.

I would love to hear from others working in this space. Where do you see the greatest opportunity for ocean-based solutions over the next decade?