Canada’s Role in the Development of Blue Finance

Canada put its name on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and attached $976.8 million over five years to marine conservation. By March 2025 it had protected 15.5 percent of its marine and coastal areas, against a target of 25 percent by the end of that year. Reading a country's ocean record means keeping three things apart: what it promised, what it built, and what it has actually protected. Canada looks quite different depending on which of the three you are counting, and so does its contribution to blue finance.

The commitments are real. Canada hosted the 2022 biodiversity conference in Montreal because the Convention on Biological Diversity keeps its secretariat in the city, and because China, which held the presidency throughout, could not open its borders during the pandemic. Canada provided the venue and argued hard for the thirty percent target. It signed the High Seas Treaty in 2024. When that agreement came into force in January 2026, more than eighty countries were party to it and Canada was not among them.

What Canada built was a way of putting a conservation deal together. The Great Bear Rainforest agreements of 2006 and 2007 covered 6.4 million hectares of coastal British Columbia, an area about the size of Ireland, and came with a one-time commitment of $120 million. What made them unusual was that everything closed at the same time. First Nations, the two governments and six private foundations settled the conservation plan, the land use decisions and the money together, and set up an institution to hold the capital afterward. That institution, Coast Funds, still runs. It holds $118 million across two organizations, a $60 million fund invested in businesses along the coast and a charity managing a permanent endowment of about $56 million. The endowment is not spent. It is invested, and the income it throws off is what pays for the work each year.

That structure answers a problem about time. Conservation has usually been paid for through grants with fixed terms, tied to deliverables, running as long as a funder's priorities hold. Stewardship has no end date. Somebody has to be out on the water counting fish and checking closures in 2050, and no grant renewed every three years can promise that. The people who built the Great Bear Rainforest deal borrowed the mechanics from infrastructure project finance, where nothing disburses until every condition has been met at one closing, and the name for it, project finance for permanence, arrived afterward. The governance was settled at that closing too, on the same terms and at the same moment as the money. An endowment paying out for fifty years needs somebody on the other side who will still be there in fifty years to receive it and do the work.

Seventeen First Nations closed the same kind of agreement in the Great Bear Sea in June 2024. The Great Bear Sea Project Finance for Permanence brought $335 million to the northern coast of British Columbia, with the two governments and a group of philanthropic donors alongside them. Only part of it is permanent. A marine stewardship fund pays out from an endowment, while a community prosperity fund and a fund for regional marine planning both spend down over twenty years, which accounts for half the total. What was made permanent was the stewardship.

This is what Canada gave the field. Not a market, not an instrument that trades, and not a way of pricing ocean risk, but a method for assembling a conservation deal so that it holds after the people who signed it have moved on. Versions of it have since been used in Brazil, Costa Rica, Bhutan and Peru, and Canada has applied it again in the Northwest Territories and the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut. It is a real contribution and a narrow one. It does nothing about how a bank lends against a fishing license, how an underwriter prices a coastal risk, or whether the condition of a fish stock ever reaches a credit file. Those questions are still open here, and the country that solved the duration problem has not gone near them.

Fisheries and Oceans set out in 2021 to establish sixteen new marine protected areas by the end of 2025. By March 2025 it had established one, Tang.ɢ̲wan — ḥačxʷiqak — Tsig̱is, in the offshore Pacific. Parks Canada had committed to ten new national marine conservation areas and had established none. In November 2025 the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development reported that the departments were not on track for the 2025 target and had no updated plan for 2030, which by then was a formality. The 15.5 percent I started with is what that adds up to.

So how much of that could a different financing structure have fixed? Less than the gap suggests. Six years after Canada set a standard prohibiting oil and gas exploration, mining and bottom trawling inside marine protected areas, the departments had still not written the guidance telling their own staff how to apply it. Money was not the obstacle there. Establishing a protected area also means agreeing with the people who fish those waters about what will be allowed in them, and that conversation runs at the speed of the relationship, not the speed of the funding.

The part finance can fix is smaller and quite specific. The $976.8 million Canada committed to marine conservation in 2021 ran for five years and ended in March 2026. By the close of the audit period, nothing further had been set aside for the 2030 target. The money stopped four years before the date. Nobody erred in setting it up that way. Appropriations run in five-year cycles because that is how budgets are built, and a department cannot commit money a future Parliament has not voted, so a permanent obligation gets funded in five-year pieces and everyone involved knows it. That is the problem the Great Bear Sea structure was built around, and the only part of the shortfall a financing design could have reached.

In March 2026 the government announced A Force of Nature, $3.8 billion for nature, including funding for up to fourteen new marine protected and conserved areas and a taskforce on how to account for nature in financial decisions. It is a larger number than the last one and it runs on a fresh five-year clock against the same 2030 date. Whether it produces protected areas will turn on the guidance nobody has written and the conversations that have not finished, neither of which money accelerates.

Which leaves the three things worth keeping apart. Having the money is the easy part, and Canada has had it since 2021. Structuring it so that it outlasts the government that voted it is harder, and Canada has done that properly once, on one coast, in agreements that First Nations built and led. Producing something in the water is harder still, and that is where the record thins. The country that worked out how to fund stewardship for decades still has to get the areas established, and no financing structure does that part.