Taking Stock
Who Remembers a Company’s Environmental Record?
A missed payment follows a borrower to the next lender. A fuel spill in a First Nation's fishing grounds usually doesn't. Why environmental history stays behind, and where it travels.
Taking Stock
How ocean systems become economically and financially relevant. This section traces the pathways from physical ocean conditions to operational consequence, economic cost, and financial response. It covers the transmission mechanisms that connect what happens in the water to what appears on balance sheets, in insurance markets, and in capital allocation decisions.
Finance and the Ocean Are One System
A fishing boat belongs to somebody, feeds a family, and rests on a stock that may or may not be there next year. The divisions between those things are ours, not the ocean's.
Taking Stock
Swim, Drink, Fish: Gord Downie and the Water
Ten years after the Tragically Hip's last concert, a look at the ocean in their songs and the water advocacy Gord Downie carried away from the stage. A three-word standard, a decade on a charity board, and a pier across the street from his family home.
Taking Stock
Who Checks That Blue Finance Works
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.
Taking Stock
How Bankable Is Blue Carbon
Coastal wetlands store carbon well. A lender needs reliable prices, an issuance record, a committed buyer and risk transfer. Few blue carbon projects yet combine all four, and Canada has not reached issuance.
Taking Stock
What Insurers Know About Canada’s Coastal Risk
Canadian flood coverage has widened to most of the market, and what insurers still will not write is concentrated in a small number of high-risk homes. What they have learned there is not reaching lenders, governments, or municipalities.
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.
The Rules
The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
More than 120,000 ocean observations flow into global forecasting systems every day, coordinated by a UNESCO body few could describe with precision. The data it maintains is what coastal risk models, catastrophe pricing, and blue finance rely on.
The Rules
The UN Ocean Decade
The UN Ocean Decade runs from 2021 to 2030 with seven ambitious outcomes. Its real contribution is narrower and more useful: making ocean ignorance less defensible, and lowering the information costs that make ocean-linked financial decisions hard to make well.
Taking Stock
Blue Finance Can Use the Tools Banks Already Have
In 2024, more than 250 Canadian financial institutions mapped their loan books against flood and wildfire hazard. What that exercise could see, and what it could not, is the more useful guide to where blue finance stands.