Three Key Green Giving Trends Underlined by New Ocean Funding Report

Can we humans save the ocean from ourselves? Last year’s United Nations biodiversity summit took a big step toward that goal, with nations agreeing to protect 30% of the world’s oceans and land by 2030, formalizing the pact known as 30x30. But the question remains: Will funding materialize?

Almost a year after setting that goal and on the eve of the U.N.’s annual climate change conference, a report released last week on ocean funding finds that there’s a long way to go. At least nine times more funding — government, private and philanthropic — is needed for marine-protected areas, even though philanthropic support has more than doubled over the past 12 years.

The 27-page report, “Funding Trends 2023: Tracking Grantmaking in Marine Area-based Conservation,” was compiled by the organization Our Shared Seas and is focused on what might seem like a fairly narrow topic: foundations supporting geographically defined protected zones, such as the wildlife migration corridor near the Galápagos Islands or the waters around Canada and Greenland relied on by Inuit communities.

But the report’s lessons echo dynamics common across environmental philanthropy. Regrantors are playing a central role as grantees and grantors. Money once flowed overwhelmingly to the Global North, but that may be changing. Funding is rising, but not quickly enough to meet set goals, let alone stop degradation. And billionaires, as you may have heard, are a major presence.

As such, this new publication offers a look at how these trends can play out even within a single segment of environmental philanthropy. It is the latest in a series of similar reports from Our Shared Seas, which is supported by CEA Consulting. It was backed by the regrantor Oceans 5 and Bloomberg Ocean Initiative, a project of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The seemingly limited focus of the report belies the immense geographical scale involved. Take one of the zones featured in the report’s case studies, the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area in the Antarctic, the largest of its kind in the world. It covers more square kilometers than France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom combined. The ocean, after all, covers more than two-thirds of the earth.

In sum, the report offers an analysis of grantmaking numbers that is not commonly available in the space, outside of sources like ClimateWorks Foundation’s annual reports on climate mitigation philanthropy. The result is a dive into a set of trends that largely mirror those we’ve seen across the green giving sector, whether in statistics or anecdotal evidence.

Regrantors roam the seas

As in other areas of green philanthropy, regrantors are a prominent presence throughout marine-protected area conservation. “Regranting organizations appear to be playing an increasingly influential role,” the authors write.

The third-largest grantmaker in the report’s ranking is a regrantor — Oceans 5, one of the report’s funders — and in total, four intermediaries make the top 20, including Blue Nature Alliance, Resources Legacy Fund, and the prize competition The Audacious Project.

Two of the top three grantees are also regrantors, which make up half of the top eight, based on the report’s analysis of funding from 2010 to 2022. One of those is the Pew Charitable Trusts, which both carries out work and regrants funds. The rest are purpose-built regrantors: Resources Legacy Fund, Oceans 5 and Makeway.

The report cites fairly standard reasons for the reliance on regrantors: foundations’ limited capacity; pooling funds for leverage, collaboration or rapid response; and reduced transaction costs.

Rising funding, but even bigger need

One of the report’s key findings is that funding has more than doubled for marine area-based conservation over the past decade-plus, from less than $50 million in 2010 to $122 million last year. That said, that increase did take place over 12 years, and reaching the level of overall funding estimated to be necessary to fulfill the 30x30 goal would require a not just a doubling, but a minimum nine-fold increase.

To put some numbers to that, an estimated $9 billion to $12 billion in annual investment from all sources is required, according to an analysis by the United Nations Environment Program. Philanthropy alone is not expected, nor even perhaps currently capable, of providing that much. But philanthropy does make up a key part of the pie, accounting for about 13% of funding in 2022, or $122 million versus nearly $1 billion from other sources, according to the report.

More funding also appears to be moving to the Global South. North America received roughly 70% of funding for marine-based conservation in 2010, but that had fallen to 20% in 2022, with the share going to other geographies nearly tripling. Lower-income countries are also starting to receive more funding, with their portion rising from 30% to 50% during that span. But data limitations mean these findings “should be interpreted loosely,” the authors note.

Billionaires play a major role

Unlike funding for environmental philanthropy as a whole, billionaires are not an overwhelming presence in funding for marine-area-based conservation. But it’s hard to miss them — and one in particular has defined the field.

The foundation of Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, who died in March, and his wife, Betty, put more than $223 million into this work over the dozen years the report covers, more than the next four largest funders combined. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s funding in this case is yet another demonstration of the ability of a single billionaire donor to support and shape specific areas of grantmaking.

Others are not far behind. The second-largest funder is the Walton Family Foundation, which is directed by Walmart heirs. Other living megadonors in the top 20 include Arcadia, backed by the family wealth of cofounder Lisbet Rausing; Oceankind, founded by Lucy Southworth, the wife of Google cofounder Larry Page; Minderoo Foundation, the philanthropy of mining billionaire Andrew Forrest; and the Wyss Foundation, of namesake biotech billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.

Will more billionaires sign up to save the seas? The ocean could certainly use another Moore, if not many more.

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