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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ocean Life
Whale numbers have climbed back from near-extinction. So has their work in the ocean: moving nutrients up through the water, carrying carbon to the seafloor. The waters they returned to are busier and louder, and what happens next depends on how those waters are managed.
Blue Currents
Canada and Quebec put $50 million into a fisheries fund that cannot move money until September. Nineteen Indigenous communities received search-and-rescue boats. Ocean-finance standards are being written for regulators internationally. Canada has no equivalent.
Industry Profiles
Open-net pen salmon farming ends in coastal BC on June 30, 2029. DFO has launched a systematic review of the sea lice evidence, the peer-reviewed literature points in several directions, and no independent analysis exists of what replacing BC production would cost.
Industry Profiles
Canadian farmed salmon exports were worth $944.5 million in 2024, and 93.5 percent went to one market. Open-net pen production in BC ends in 2029, with no proven replacement at that volume. The capital to build one has to be committed before a lender has anything to price against.
Industry Profiles
In 2024 the Atlantic provinces out-produced British Columbia in farmed finfish for the first time since 1991. Salmon accounts for 65 percent of the value of Canadian aquaculture, and 93.5 percent of farmed salmon exports go to the United States. The ownership is largely foreign.
Stressors
The ocean rose 5.9 millimetres in 2024, above the recent trend. Atlantic Canada, sinking as seas rise, could see a metre by 2100. A major Fraser flood could cost $20 to $30 billion. That exposure is being built and financed now, at conditions the assets were never designed for.
Stressors
Since the industrial era, the ocean’s surface pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1, a 26 percent increase in acidity. Shell-building species feel it first, and in BC it already reaches juvenile salmon through the food web. The finance built around those fisheries has not priced it in.
Indigenous Stewardship
Reserve land can’t be pledged as conventional loan collateral. That constraint has shaped what Indigenous communities can finance, who can lend to them, and how stewardship, infrastructure and ownership are funded.
Indigenous Stewardship
$335 million closed in the Great Bear Sea, with $152 million of it endowed in perpetuity. Perpetual money requires a perpetual counterparty. Tenure, enforcement, and decision-making continuity are the three questions that set the term on any long-duration exposure, and they were answered first.
Ocean Physics
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation keeps northwestern Europe warmer than its latitude allows and drives some of the North Atlantic's most productive fisheries. The question of whether it is slowing down is one of the most consequential in climate science right now.
Industry Profiles
Canada claims the Northwest Passage as internal waters. Russia, Norway, and the United States are building Arctic presence faster than Canada is. The sovereignty argument is well established; the physical capacity to back it is still being bought. A look at the gap between the two.
Industry Profiles
Ice-class vessels, a four-month season, and conservative insurers make commercial Arctic shipping a hard case. Public capital, Indigenous ownership, and resource balance sheets carry the weight instead. A look at who finances Canada's Arctic marine infrastructure, and why.