The ocean is not just an environmental issue; it is a major economic, strategic, and financial one. It underpins global value chains, protects critical infrastructure, supports food security, and plays a central role in climate regulation.
Yet, despite its essential role, private investment in the Ocean remains largely insufficient relative to actual needs. Therefore, the question is not whether we should invest in the Ocean, but what will convince more companies and investors to do so.
Corporate decision-making frameworks are built around two key concepts: opportunity and risk. It is through this lens that we will address investment in a regenerative and sustainable blue economy. In this article, we deliberately adopt the perspective of an investor or business leader when we ask the question: is investing in the blue economy an economically rational decision? In other words, what is the business case for investing in the ocean? What is there to gain concretely?
Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (1873–1876)
This question can be understood in several ways. Profitability may be strictly financial with a measurable return on investment. In some cases, investing in a regenerative and sustainable blue economy does indeed generate direct financial returns.
According to the OECD’s Ocean Economy to 2050 report (2025), growth projections for the blue economy as a whole, under a transition scenario toward more sustainable activities, are highly encouraging:
“By 2050, under an accelerated low-carbon transition, the OECD predicts that the ocean economy could grow 2.5 times its 1995 size to approximately USD $3.25 trillion, with almost half comprising the marine and coastal tourism sector and the offshore wind and renewables sector share growing by 21 times its 2020 level.”
For economic decision-makers, the message is clear: the ocean is not a niche market, but a long-term engine for growth.
A 2025 study by Bain further shows that more than half of business leaders cite economic interest as the primary motivation for their sustainability investments. Furthermore, this economic interest goes beyond financial profitability alone.
In the context of the blue economy, investments in nature-based solutions illustrate this logic particularly well. In the Earth Security Unlocking Resilience ROI report (2025), based on the analysis of over 180 mangrove-related projects, this think tank identifies five value-creation drivers for companies: access to capital, innovation, carbon offsetting, operational resilience, and reputation.
Mangroves, for example, reduce exposure to extreme climate events, store carbon, and support local economic activities such as fisheries. For companies exposed to coastal assets or maritime value chains, investing in mangrove restoration means reducing future costs while strengthening strategic positioning. Mangroves provide ecosystem services valued at up to USD 57,000 per hectare per year (Hoegh-Guldberg, 2015), by reducing storm exposure, storing carbon, and supporting local fisheries.
As the authors of the report conclude:
“These insights make a clear business case: investing in coastal ecosystems is not only a moral or environmental imperative, but a high return resilience strategy for long-term value creation.”
The company Coral Vita embodies this logic. It has developed a commercially scalable coral reef restoration model, growing corals in land-based nurseries before transplanting them onto degraded reefs.
Its business model relies on very concrete levers:
Coral Vita thus demonstrates that marine ecosystem restoration can be both regenerative and economically rational, creating new opportunities while reducing risk.
At the Blue Economy and Finance Forum in June 2025 in Monaco, Barbara Karuth-Zelle, Chief Operating Officer of Allianz, recalled that companies invested massively in cybersecurity once they realised that cyber risk was systemic, costly, and potentially existential. The same logic must now apply to the ocean.
The impacts of ocean degradation are no longer theoretical, and economic losses are already measurable. The Planet Tracker report Catch It Like It’s Hot (2025) examines the financial impacts of climate change on the fishing industry through several case studies:
At a macroeconomic scale, the WWF’s Navigating Ocean Risks report (2021) estimates the cost of inaction:
“Key sectors stand to lose up to USD$8.4 trillion over the next 15 years without immediate action to safeguard ocean resources and align financial portfolios with the Paris Agreement’s target to keep a rise in global temperatures to within 1.5C.”
The report goes further, showing that two-thirds of companies dependent on the ocean are exposed to this risk of capital loss.
Conversely, a sustainable development scenario would significantly reduce risks across sectors, with potential savings estimated at USD 5.1 trillion.
Tools do exist to identify and quantify these risks, such as the Coastal Risk Index developed by the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), the University of California Santa Cruz, AXA, and IHE Delft. This open-source platform combines hydrodynamic models with social vulnerability data to assess coastal flood risks and the protective role of natural ecosystems such as mangroves and coral reefs.
However, the challenge remains considerable. Research by Beatrice Crona of the Stockholm Resilience Center (The Anthropocene Reality of Financial Risks, Crona et al., 2021) highlights the inability of conventional risk-assessment tools to capture the complex interconnections between climate, biodiversity, water, and land use.
The most damaging climate-related risks to portfolios may stem from second-order effects rather than direct impacts: for example, the sudden collapse of a marine ecosystem triggering supply chain disruptions, use-conflicts, or cascading regulatory shocks. These threshold dynamics and tipping points are rarely incorporated into current financial models, as they involve complex chain reactions that are difficult even for experts to model. Yet failing to integrate them leads to a massive underestimation of real risk exposure. Yet failing to integrate them leads to a massive underestimation of real risk exposure. risk exposure.
The authors call decision makers to “cognitively close the risk loop” by equipping them with tools to measure the impacts of human activities on ecosystems and by creating structures that ensure this information is acted upon.
Assessing the risks and opportunities generated by the economic, social, and environmental context on a company’s financial performance corresponds to financial materiality, or single materiality. This decision-making framework seeks to translate risks and opportunities into financial value. But is this translation always possible—or even desirable? Faced with the complexity of living systems, systematically reducing these dynamics to financial equivalents quickly reaches its limits.
Illustration © Chappatte in Der Spiegel
Not all impacts can, or should, be fully translated into financial terms. This is precisely why impact materiality has become a central tool for investment decision-making.
It focuses on what companies and investors cannot afford to ignore, even when financial translation is partial or uncertain: ecosystem degradation, erosion of natural capital, or the loss of essential ecosystem services.
Combined with financial materiality, it forms the concept of double materiality, now at the core of European and international reporting and risk-management frameworks.
In a regenerative blue economy, ocean impact metrics play a decisive role. They enable financial flows to be directed toward activities that generate measurable positive impacts for marine ecosystems, while avoiding investments that exacerbate existing pressures.
For investors and finance departments, these indicators become management tools, just like risk or performance metrics. They help arbitrate between investment opportunities based on their contribution to the resilience of ocean systems on which economic activity depends, and they make visible what has long remained invisible in investment decisions.
In a regenerative and sustainable blue economy, investing means strengthening ocean capital, the foundational ecological asset essential to economic functioning and long-term value creation, and repairing past damage, in other words, repaying our debt. This approach is consistent with ecological accounting frameworks such as CARE, which view ecosystems not as mere externalities, but as forms of capital that must be maintained and regenerated.
This reallocation of capital is all the more urgent given the massive scale of nature-negative financial flows. According to the State of Finance for Nature report (UNEP, 2026), in 2023:
In other words, the main challenge is not only to mobilise new “green” or “blue” capital, but to redirect existing financial flows (including USD 4.9 trillion in private capital) by explicitly withdrawing from investments incompatible with the preservation of natural capital.
Unlike cybersecurity, mentioned earlier, the ocean is a global common good. A company that invests in marine ecosystem regeneration alone will not necessarily reap the direct benefits if other actors continue to degrade this shared capital. This is the classic tragedy of the commons applied to the ocean: rational on the individual level in the short term, but maintaining destructive investments becomes collectively irrational in the medium and long term. Conversely, if all actors (companies, investors, and governments) agree to withdraw from harmful investments, the benefits become shared, systemic risks decline, and collective value increases.
Beyond short-term financial considerations, investing in a regenerative and sustainable blue economy means recognising a fundamental reality: the ocean is a strategic long-term asset. It underpins value chains, food security, climate stability, and ultimately the viability of the global economy.
This value-creation logic through investment in ocean capital is already taking shape among pioneering companies in the regenerative blue economy. Companies and investors who have understood this, such as those highlighted during the first edition of the Blue Economy and Finance Forum (BEFF), demonstrate that it is possible to align economic performance, ecosystem regeneration, and sustainable activity.
The true business case for the ocean lies in the ability of economic actors to act collectively, both by directing capital toward regenerative activities and by explicitly renouncing those that compromise the future of ocean capital.
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