Building a positive business case to protect marine areas

Summary

Blue Alliance – Marine Protected Areas is a social enterprise working with governments to build and manage ‘bankable’ Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Its approach is to aggregate high-impact MPA projects under a single not-for-profit entity to more easily attract and utilize blended finance for conservation and to support reef-positive businesses. In the early stage of projects, grants and debt financed long-term leases for MPAs, to be co-managed with the government. This gives projects the time to build out diversified revenue streams from e.g., eco-tourism, blue carbon credits, and sustainable fisheries. By developing blue economy-positive businesses for local communities, BF helps MPAs become self-sustaining and limits dependency on grant providers. An example of Blue Finance’s efforts can be found in Belize, where a USD 1.2 million facility supported initiatives including blue carbon projects and nature-based tourism enhanced protection of 132,000 hectares of coral reef ecosystems.

Key Takeaways:

Boosting investability by aggregating projects: Bringing together multiple nature-conservation projects can help attract investment through increasing ticket sizes, diversifying risk, reducing transaction costs, and improving visibility.

Positive business case for nature conservation: Combining revenue streams from nature-positive business models (e.g., eco-tourism, carbon credits) strengthens the investment case for private finance and can support conservation projects to become financially self-sustaining.

Social enterprise to facilitate collaboration: Social enterprises can play a vital role in facilitating and managing conservation collaboration between private entities and governments.

Building a positive business case to protect marine areas

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