The world’s oceans provide trillions of dollars in goods and services every year, and healthy oceans are crucial to sustainable development. But many ocean ecosystems are in steep decline because of pollution, over-exploitation, habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change—and without concerted near-term effort, the damage may become irreversible.
Drawing on 20 years of research and experience, Catalysing Ocean Finance demonstrates how a modest investment of public finance—on the order of $5 billion over the next 10-20 years—can scale up proven ocean planning and policy tools, leverage financial flows, transform ocean markets, and reverse the global decline in ocean health. This publication demonstrates that, far from being an intractable problem, sustainable ocean management could become a successful legacy of today’s generation of decision-makers. It shows how the challenges facing the ocean stem from widely understood market and policy failures - failures which can be addressed through the application of appropriate mixes of market and policy instruments.
Volume I explores the main causes of coastal and ocean degradation and presents a new paradigm to sustainably utilise open access resources such as the global ocean. It looks at lessons learned over the past 20 years and sets forth a road map to restore and protect our ocean for the next 20 years.