Small group discussions focused on two themes: mobilising blue finance and financing area based conservation measures, including under BBNJ. The aim of these small group exercises was to consider what financing solutions and ocean finance instruments could offer the best prospects for SIDS needs and ambitions.
Mobilising Finance
Participants emphasised the need to:
- Identify clear blue financing needs and priorities, including through better data.
- Build/strengthen the environment required to build market confidence and attract finance (governance, political will, legislation, successes)
- Develop blue finance guidelines and taxonomies.
- Strengthen capacity and technical support across all aspects of blue finance.
- Support transitions from fossil fuels to renewables to generate cashflow.
- To derisk, use guarantees and refinancing tools; clarify the role of ODA and the role of and the Fund Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD).
- Explore the BBNJ fund for rehabilitation and restoration.
- Establish a SIDS finance and knowledge hub to share lessons—including failures— of initiatives for blue finance mobilisation and undertake diagnostics and capacity building.
Financing Area Based Conservation
Key points included:
- Prioritising simple, sustainable and scalable solutions such as user fees, while recognising collection challenges.
- Exploring biodiversity and nature credit schemes with potential for replication.
- Addressing high enforcement costs through digital evidence, fines and port based accountability.
- Leveraging regional economies of scale.
- Identifying corporate incentives—for example, reduced whale strike incidents though tech/AI assisted solutions will reduce costs for shipping.
- Recognising that monetary benefits from marine genetic resources may be limited.
- Matching financing solutions to the scale of need (local, national, regional).
- Ensuring community buy in and transparency, including through revenue sharing.
- Improve and increase ocean asset valuation to better quantify benefits, including for fisheries.
- Learning from existing credit schemes.