Blue Finance Canada archive
Essays, analysis and explainers from across Blue Finance Canada, arranged from newest to oldest.
78 published essays
Treated as a labelling exercise, blue finance changes very little. Applied seriously, it alters how financial decisions actually get made, in ways that sit awkwardly with how most institutions already work.
There is no single rulebook for blue finance. Four institutions are writing the rules from four different starting points, and they agree on more than their different mandates would suggest.
Blue carbon is usually pictured as mangroves and seagrass. The part that does the climate work is harder to see, and it changes what a carbon credit is actually buying.
Canada has the coastline, the ecosystems, and growing policy interest in blue carbon. What it does not have yet is a working market. That gap is where the real near-term opportunity sits.
Canada built one institution to finance the projects too large, too long, and too complex for ordinary lenders. Much of what it funds sits in or next to the ocean, whether the label says so or not.
On BC's central coast, the Wuikinuxv Nation is working out whether finance can support salmon stewardship over the decades salmon actually need. The governance and the priorities are already there. The open question is whether a financing structure can be built to fit them instead of the reverse.
Nothing new has to be built. Canadian directors already owe their duty to the corporation rather than its shareholders, the regulatory expectations are already written, and the credit tools already work. Blue finance will take hold here through those, or not at all.
In 2023, the world's largest offshore wind company became the first energy firm to issue a blue bond. What the money actually funded says something about where corporate blue finance is heading.
Banks already know how to price changing conditions. But a seven-year loan can fund a thirty-year asset, and conditions don’t reset at the end of the term. Blue finance doesn’t need new machinery. It needs the machinery we have applied over the horizon the assets actually run on.
In 2018 one of the world's smallest countries borrowed fifteen million dollars and, in doing so, showed the world what a blue bond could be. The money was small. What Seychelles attached to it, in conditions, reporting, and marine protection, was the part worth studying.
Antarctica has no owner, no permanent population, and limited economic activity. It has been governed cooperatively for more than sixty years. That turns out to be a useful reference point for the ocean.
After nearly two decades of talks, the first treaty governing biodiversity on the high seas became law in January 2026. It reaches almost half the planet, and Canada has to account for it.