Taking Stock
The Best Map of Canada's Coastal Risk Belongs to Insurers
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.
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Stressors
What Happens When a Coral Reef Dies
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
Microplastics
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
The Great Whales
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
July 2026
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
Aquaculture: Environment, Science, and the BC Transition
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
Aquaculture: Finance
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
Aquaculture: The Industry
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
Sea Level Rise
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
Ocean Acidification
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
Why Indigenous Ocean Stewardship Is Hard to Finance
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
Finance Follows Governance
$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.