Thirty years in Canadian finance, most recently a credit union Chief Risk Officer, now writing Blue Finance Canada. CFA, MBA, ICD.D.
Industry Profiles
On a summer morning in Victoria, a cruise ship docks at Ogden Point. A whale watching company loads twelve people onto a rigid inflatable. An Indigenous-led cultural tour is about to begin. All three are coastal tourism. Almost nothing else about their economics is the same.
The Rules
A bank can be diversified by geography, sector and borrower, yet still depend on the same natural system. Canadian concentration rules do not ask banks to look for that exposure.
The Basics
Flood, fisheries exposure, port disruption. Each one sits on a bank's register as its own category, and the ocean condition connecting them sits on none of them. What OSFI's climate guidance measures, what it leaves out, and why a risk nobody can measure well ends up mispriced.
Taking Stock
Construction lenders do not release funds until an independent surveyor confirms the work was done. Blue finance has strong mechanisms for tracking where money goes, but much weaker ones for verifying what happened in the water. The capacity to close that gap already exists on Canada’s three coasts.
In Practice
Ten projects worldwide are issuing blue carbon credits, and one accounts for most of them. Here is what the market actually looks like, what a lender needs before carbon revenue counts toward a loan, and why Canada has not issued a credit yet.
The Players
A fisheries stock assessment does more than count fish. It can determine the quota, license value and borrowing capacity, and in some cases whether a coastal community can finance the economic participation its rights make possible.
Industry Profiles
Ocean data in Canada has long been treated as a public good. Three separate pressures are beginning to complicate that assumption, and together they signal that the next decade of Canadian marine technology will need to navigate questions the sector has not previously had to address directly.
Industry Profiles
CARIS began as a small hydrographic software firm in Fredericton and became the global standard used by navies and charting agencies worldwide. It is the exception rather than the rule in Canadian marine technology commercialisation.
Industry Profiles
Canada has the longest coastline in the world and some of the sparsest ocean monitoring coverage per kilometre of any comparable coastal nation. That gap is the defining structural feature of Canada's marine technology landscape.
Taking Stock
Insurers are usually the first to put a number on coastal risk, and not because they are more virtuous than anyone else. They cannot defer the cost of getting it wrong.
Stressors
Reef decline is gradual and self-reinforcing. Coral gives way to algae, the reef flattens, and recovery gets harder with each event. The protection and fisheries it provided never showed on a balance sheet, so the loss registers only when replacing them becomes unavoidable.
Stressors
Less than a tenth of all plastic ever made has been recycled. What is already in the ocean cannot be recovered: the particles are too small and too widespread. The response that works is making less plastic in the first place, an industrial and regulatory problem more than a conservation one.