The ocean plays a vital role in Earth’s life support system, and its natural assets are indispensable to industries both on land and at sea. A growing cohort of businesses and investors appreciate that their commercial resilience is closely tied to natural capital. At the same time, regulators, investors and consumers are increasingly demanding greater transparency from companies regarding their nature-related impacts, urging them to take active steps to prevent harm. The need for high quality data to assess the private sector’s impact on nature and exposure to financial risks from depleted ecosystems is growing.

Yet a lack of data means that businesses and financial institutions remain largely unaware of their exposure to the physical, transition and systemic risks related to ocean pollution. Data gaps constrain regulators from holding polluters to account. Companies and investors may also miss the benefits of transitioning to a pollution-free ocean. This gap presents a critical opportunity to engage with private sector stakeholders, support the integration of ocean pollution considerations into commercial and financial decision-making, and build a robust evidence base to drive action.

This discussion paper, Investing in a Pollution- Free Ocean, assesses the current landscape of actions by the business and finance sectors to address ocean pollution while identifying potential opportunities for collaboration as part of the implementation of Back to Blue’s A Global Ocean Free From the Harmful Impacts of Pollution by 2050: Roadmap for Action.

It recommends:

• Advocating for the wider inclusion of ocean pollution considerations into corporate sustainability disclosures and decision making, recognising that much ocean pollution originates from land-based sectors that have traditionally overlooked such impacts.
• Fostering cross-industry collaboration as well as consensus between scientists and the private sector on a standardised set of indicators for corporate and financial reporting on ocean pollution impacts.
• Collaborating actively with the science and policy communities to ensure that ocean pollution data are increasingly ‘decision-useful’ and drive action by both the public and private sectors.
• Building a strong evidence case about the various sources of ocean pollution to drive corporate accountability and transparency throughout the economy.
• Actively supporting and collaborating with corporate sustainability initiatives (for example, The Taskforce on Nature- Related Financial Disclosures, CDP, the Science Based Targets Network and the World Benchmarking Alliance) to facilitate the integration of ocean pollution considerations into corporate and financial decision-making.

IOC UNESCO and UNEP’s proposed UN Ocean Decade Programme entitled ‘A global ocean free from the harmful impacts of pollution by 2050’ can play an important role in delivering these recommendations.