Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) activates young people, develops and implements innovative solutions, and mobilizes an ocean workforce to restore the health of the ocean in our lifetime.
Since founded by Daniela Fernandez in 2014, SOA has built the world’s largest network of young ocean leaders and supported innovative startups, nonprofits, and grassroots campaigns dedicated to solving the greatest threats facing our planet.
Two years ago at the World Economic Forum, we shared our vision with the world, and Salesforce Chair and Co-CEO Marc Benioff challenged us to accelerate 100 solutions by 2021.
Today, SOA is proud to announce that as of 2021, we have more than doubled our initial goal: we have accelerated 222 startups, nonprofits, and grassroots initiatives all over the world, each dedicated to restoring and sustaining the health of our ocean.
The Ocean Solutions Accelerator helps entrepreneurs launch for-profit ocean solutions for a sustainable blue economy by providing funding, mentorship, and other critical resources to scale their ventures and amplify their impact.
The Ocean Leadership Program (OLP) holistically supports over 6,000 global participants with the resources and networks they need to build ocean-healing solutions and to reach their full potential as ocean leaders. The OLP awards Microgrants of up to $15,000 USD to outstanding youth leaders to execute and scale their projects, and provides 72 youth-led Hubs with leadership and programmatic support.
Together, these 222 solutions for ocean restoration have touched tens of thousands of lives, restored critical marine ecosystems worldwide, invented sustainable alternatives to plastics, pioneered cutting-edge technology to illuminate the mysteries of our deepest seas and much, much more.
Each startup, nonprofit, and grassroots initiative has focused its efforts across five key areas of ocean health impact.
Learn more, and explore all 222 solutions below.
IMPACT:
15,540 metric tons of CO2 reduced, avoided, or sequestered
The fight to address climate change cannot be separated from the drive to support solutions that address carbon removal and blue carbon ecosystem development. In 2020, 31.5 gigatons of carbon (CO2) were emitted globally, with 83% of the carbon cycle circulating through the ocean. Certain marine and coastal ecosystems—like tidal marshes, mangroves, and seagrass meadows—play a critical role in this cycle by sequestering and storing what’s then known as “blue carbon.”
These ecosystems are critical to climate change mitigation. Mangroves and salt marshes, for example, remove carbon from the atmosphere at a rate 10 times greater and store five times more carbon per acre than tropical forests.
IMPACT:
1,755 metric tons of solid waste removed, upcycled, or avoided
Each year, only 9% of plastic produced ends up recycled—which results in 10 million tons of plastic dumped into our oceans every year. That’s nearly equivalent to the weight of the entire human population. These pollutants are responsible for choking marine life, destroying both marine and coastal ecosystems, and polluting our own food sources.
Today, the average person ingests over 70,000 microplastics each year (that’s 100 pieces over the course of a single meal). The solutions in this category work to reduce and eliminate items like single-use plastics. Their work in turn helps to build the circular economy, which promotes the extension of product lifecycles and aims to decrease solid waste and pollution.
IMPACT:
89,128 square meters of blue carbon ecosystems protected or restored
In addition to sustaining marine life and the communities that depend on it, coastal ecosystems account for approximately half of the total carbon sequestered in ocean sediments. These may include coral reefs, mangrove forests, kelp forests, wetlands, and seagrass beds. Together, they serve as nurseries for marine organisms and as critical areas of blue carbon capture.
However, many marine ecosystems are experiencing degradation and destruction by human activities, which not only leads to species depletion, but also releases the critically stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Solutions in this category have monitored 150,000 kilometers of coastline for climate change adaptation planning, detected 67,000 whales to avoid marine collisions, produced 150+ ocean literacy reports and media projects, hosted 260 events with more than 30,000 youth participants, and much more.
More than 80% of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. In the United States, only 35% of the ocean and coastal waters have been mapped with modern methods. In order to inform policy decisions that ensure marine and coastal ecosystem sustainability—and to empower humans worldwide to take local action to save the ocean—we need reliable data sources, mapping, and consistent analysis.
Some projects in the category of ocean literacy, data, and research focus on data collection and analysis, while other initiatives are dedicated to fostering knowledge-sharing and creating local opportunities for action. All play critical roles in leveraging knowledge and technical skills to catalyze lasting ocean impact.
Every year, 30% of commercial fish stocks are overfished, while harmful fishing practices cause over 38 million tons of bycatch (the incidental capture of a non-target species). As a result, this institutionalized overfishing has contributed to a marked decrease in recorded marine species over the last 40 years.
Sustainable protein, fisheries, and aquaculture solutions address the challenge of sustainably feeding the world's growing human population without the continued exploitation of marine habitats and species.
SOA’s solutions in this area are varied, with many developing new, innovative systems of impact tracking. One Microgrant project is developing a supply chain around selling “gourmet” sea urchins in order to quell California’s invasive purple sea urchin population explosion. Another is piloting a CSA-style delivery service in the Philippines to support seasonal, sustainably caught seafood. Our Accelerator alumni are hard at work in this area as well, developing plant-based alternatives to seafood (think kelp burgers, kelp jerky, and cell-cultured tuna), net sensors to reduce bycatch, deepwater solar irrigation for seaweed farming, and more.
Microgrant
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Philippines
Pollution Reduction & the Circular Economy
Mary Jane Lamoste
Ocean Ripple will be conducting a series of beach clean-ups, and they will give collected waste to Tagpi Tagpi, who will work with women makers and entrepreneurs to create plush toys for children out of the collected materials. The two organizations will collaborate throughout the endeavor.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Colombia
Carbon (CO2) Reduction & Blue Carbon
Hector Jesús Contreras Marimón
The Casa Mangle Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia conducted a mangrove restoration project that involved the local community. Twenty local leaders were selected and trained in mangrove restoration and seed germination. A wooden structure for the mangrove nursery will also be constructed.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Guatemala
Ecosystem Preservation & Restoration
Fabio Cresto Aleina
The Cayman Crown coral reef has been declared a "no-fishing zone" for the next 10 years by the Guatemalan government. Within the framework of the SOA grant, this group will be able to continue these efforts, providing a scientific report and a policy brief to support the inclusion of the coral reef into the already existing Marine Protected Area.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Indonesia
Ecosystem Preservation & Restoration
Dennis Kurniawan
Dennis and his team worked with managers of the new Anambas Islands Marine Tourism Park to develop a regional marine management plan. The plain entails re-establishing fish habitat and restoring fish stocks with artificial reefs, increasing the percentage of coral cover with transplantation, and modelling community-based conservation activities on small islands in Anambas.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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USA
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Gemma Sahwell
This project aims to educate the average New York City resident about the ocean and marine ecosystems that the city interacts with and depends on. To enact these ocean literacy initiatives, the SOA NYC Hub will use these funds to make an interactive website, create pop-up exhibitions, do classroom demonstrations and in-person tours.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Philippines
Blue Foods (Sustainable Protein, Fisheries & Aquaculture)
Allan Carlos Apelo
SeaCrate is a new model that Tindagat is piloting in Metro Manila to encourage sustainable fishing. This project is a CSA-style subscription model to connect customers with bi-monthly deliveries of seasonal, sustainably-caught fish from their partnered small-scale fishers.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Brazil
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Lisandra Maria Barroso Matos
Virtual Diving is an environmental education project inspired by Google Cardboard. Through virtual reality glasses made of recycled cardboard, students take a virtual tour in different marine ecosystems using the Google app "Expeditions". The Virtual Diving team knows that most people never have and probably never will have the opportunity to dive in their entire lives. They also know that this is a big problem for the oceans, because it is impossible to preserve what you do not know. Through their virtual tours, they show people what exists beyond the waves. The main themes they explore are coral bleaching and marine pollution.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Japan
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Yuka Kagao
The mission of SOA Hub Japan is to become the leading network for ocean youth leaders in Japan. This grant allowed them to build out their website, pitch materials, and increase their Hub Membership base. They brought on 10 members to fill leadership roles and hosted a series of webinars featuring Japanese ocean leaders. They used initial momentum to continue to grow their membership, and are now organizing a prototype of an ocean youth leadership summit & training program in Tokyo.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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USA
Blue Foods (Sustainable Protein, Fisheries & Aquaculture)
Ashley Bae
Feeding fish without feeding them fish: This project explored the "Economic Feasibility of a Microalgae-Based Fish Feed." Verdant Seas is the exclusive licensee of a superiorly performing aquaculture feed (patent pending) that does not rely on wild marine fish. Instead, we use a blend of marine microalgae for protein and omega-3 fatty acids to achieve up to 70% faster growth rate and improved nutrition. This funding helps Verdant Seas conduct an economic feasibility study of our feed, as well as develop a land use conservation metric to understand the impact of our feed compared to conventional feeds.
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