The Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA) is a philanthropic initiative that seeks to identify and fund ocean-climate solutions across mitigation, sequestration, adaptation, and resilience. ORCA’s principal function is to provide a surge of more than $300 million dollars in grants over four years to catalyze work across a handful of immediate ocean-climate priorities. These priorities have been developed in consultation with the ocean and climate donor communities, and were honed in collaboration with potential grantees.
Press Release – April 17, 2024 Press Release – December 2, 2023We have long known that the marine environment and coastal communities are at profound risk from climate change. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation, rising seas, shifting stocks, superstorms, empty nets—climate change will have enormous effects on ocean health, and it threatens a future mass extinction event. These effects have already begun, and they are accelerating. Simultaneously, the well-being of 1.4 billion people in low elevation regions, whose livelihoods often depend on the ocean, is in jeopardy.
Recent analysis shows that ocean-based climate interventions could represent nearly half of the carbon solutions needed to keep warming below 2°C, if scaled to their fullest potential. Efforts across ocean energy, coastal habitat restoration, shipping, and carbon dioxide removal will be components of this decade’s fight against climate change but have not been prioritized to date. In tandem, conservation professionals have begun exploring how we can strengthen and adapt traditional conservation priorities to be more durable in the face of climate change, improving the resilience of marine ecosystems and protecting those coastal communities most at risk.
The ocean and climate are both underfunded areas; the nexus between them is even more overlooked. Climate funding received just two percent of total philanthropic giving in 2020, and ocean conservation received less than one percent. Funding at the intersection of ocean and climate amounted, in aggregate, to less than one one-hundredth of one percent of total philanthropic giving. The ocean funding community has not seriously prioritized climate interventions until recently (outside of resilience), and climate funders have not invested in ocean-based solutions at scale, leaving this field undeveloped. Funding has crept up in the last three years, but most of that growth has been incremental, due to both resource constraints and capacity constraints in the field. Insufficient scale is the defining barrier across all ocean-climate work today.
Together, we propose cultivating and funding a portfolio of the most important ocean-climate interventions that can be scaled today. To reduce carbon emissions, we can promote ocean-based renewables, decarbonize the global shipping sector, and fight the expansion of offshore oil and gas. To draw down existing atmospheric carbon, we can protect and restore blue carbon habitats and develop novel ocean carbon dioxide removal technologies. To improve the resilience of ocean ecosystems, we can help safeguard the Arctic and work to achieve 30×30. And to help vulnerable communities adapt, we can build a movement of engaged communities in the Global South with secured tenure rights and united in opposition to fossil fuel expansion.
For brief descriptions of the grantees/regranters, please see the FAQ What are ORCA grantees and reganters working on?
Examples of what ORCA is working on, organized by pillar:
Oceans 5 is an international funders’ collaborative dedicated to stopping overfishing, establishing marine protected areas, constraining offshore oil and gas development, and implementing ocean-climate solutions. Working closely with the other ORCA pillars, they will elevate ocean-climate ambition and leadership with cross-cutting communications, strategic political interventions, government engagement, and new capacity in priority regions.
Conservation International (CI) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) will accelerate the development of business models that integrate blue carbon ecosystem protection and/or restoration with sustainable commodity production through a newly launched technical support and grant financing facility called BC+. Models will support the recovery of mangroves, seagrass, and tidal marsh habitats while delivering local benefits.
Pooled fund on International Energy (PIE) seeks to accelerate a global transition to clean power. Working with Ocean Energy Pathway (OEP), PIE will support Regional Climate Foundations (RCFs) regranting to civil society organizations (CSOs) in priority countries to accelerate offshore wind development. PIE is an autonomous fund housed within the European Climate Foundation (ECF).
Ocean Energy Pathway (OEP) is an accelerator that unlocks new markets for sustainable offshore wind projects by delivering technical assistance to governments and building capacity and collaboration with civil society. OEP designs and implements national “pathway” strategies in more than a dozen priority countries.
The Global Offshore Wind Alliance (GOWA) is a diplomatic-led multi-stakeholder alliance bringing together governments, the private sector, international organizations, and other stakeholders to boost global offshore wind ambition and implementation. GOWA aims to increase offshore wind deployment worldwide in support of the COP28 commitment of tripling global renewable energy generation capacity by 2030 and the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C goal, while enabling countries and states to develop their offshore wind sector.
The Global Initiative for Nature, Grids and Renewables (GINGR) supports governments, industries, civil society, and the financial sector in reaching their energy, climate, and biodiversity targets in a timely and symbiotic manner. To do this, GINGR’s experts are creating holistic monitoring and reporting frameworks that track progress in nature-positive renewables and grids.
Blue Ventures’ Frontline Community Fund (FCF) supports communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis by providing catalytic, flexible, multi-year funding and tailored technical support to high-impact local organizations so they can restore marine life, improve coastal livelihoods and tackle the effects of climate change. Blue Ventures is using ORCA support to scale up the fund’s giving in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean, and aims to support over 5 million people by 2030.
Turning Tides is a new, tailor-made organization designed to deliver more equitable resourcing toward tenure security and rights recognition – the very foundations of improved societal and environmental outcomes. Turning Tides designs and employs new approaches to funding that centers power with, and provides resources more directly toward, local communities, small-scale fishers and fish workers, and Indigenous Peoples. Where tenure is socially inclusive and secure, and where rights are recognized and upheld, local communities, small-scale fishers and fish workers, and Indigenous Peoples experience greater agency and efficacy in their efforts toward food security, climate action, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental stewardship.
Ocean Conservancy will work in partnership with Oceans North and Arctic Indigenous Peoples to protect the high seas of the Central Arctic Ocean from emerging industrial threats. It will also work to increase the Bering Sea’s resilience to climate change by protecting its highly productive and globally important Arctic habitats and fisheries and their critical function for Alaska communities.
Oceans North will work in partnership with Ocean Conservancy and Arctic Indigenous Peoples to protect the high seas of the Central Arctic Ocean from emerging industrial threats. It will also work to establish community-based monitoring programs in ecologically linked areas across Canada and Greenland to ensure that these ecosystems continue to support the people who rely on them and contribute to Indigenous-led conservation and management.
ClimateWorks Foundation will build off its strategic leadership and funding for maritime shipping decarbonization over the past decade to amplify its grantmaking in Asia with the goal of moving industry and policies in alignment with a pathway to a zero-emissions shipping sector.
United Nations Foundation will bolster, catalyze expansion of, and enable a growing number of climate ambitious Pacific Island, Caribbean, and African countries to participate more fully at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the global regulator of shipping. Over the next two years, the IMO will be developing the most impactful climate regulations in its history, and strengthening and building new champions at the IMO will help achieve a final agreement that is as ambitious as possible and supports an equitable transition for developing countries.
The Grantham Environmental Trust (GET) will serve as a regranter for a portfolio of initiatives that will strengthen the marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) ecosystem, advance the development of critical science tools for monitoring, reporting and verification of the effectiveness and safety of mCDR, and accelerate the development and assessment of the most promising mCDR pathways. This initiative builds on GET’s strong relationships with leading science, technology, policy and EJ organizations active in mCDR to help unlock the full potential of the ocean’s carbon removal potential in a safe, sustainable, and just manner on a climate-relevant time-scale.
For all inquiries, please email info@oceanclimate.org.
