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.
Startup
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USA
Blue Foods (Sustainable Protein, Fisheries & Aquaculture)
Brian von Herzen
SeaForestation Co provides deepwater solar irrigation services and equipment for replete seaweed cultivation across the oceans to meet food security needs, ecosystem life support and carbon export applications. Restoring natural upwelling with deepwater irrigation of seaweed platforms restores production rates lost due to climate disruption, while staving off the Permian Mass Extinction one kelp forest at a time. SeaForestation Co addresses billion-dollar markets in food, feed and agricultural amendments while regenerating critical marine ecosystems and measuring carbon export to the deep ocean.
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Startup
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United Kingdom
Carbon (CO2) Reduction & Blue Carbon
Phill White & Russell Elfenbein
Cloud Cycle revolutionized the ready-mix industry by digitising concrete and enabling companies to improve concrete quality, reduce operational costs and CO2 emissions. Cloud Cycle has since pivoted their business.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Brazil
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Giovanna Scagnolatto
Project Transformar works with youth and low income students in Parati City to provide online marine biology classes and take them on scuba-diving excursions to bring the ocean to life for them. They will create a short documentary following 5 students and documenting their experience. This will be used to advertise the program and continue to get youth involved in future courses.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Indonesia
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Faqih Akbar Alghozali
The Elasmobranch Citizen Science Network aims to create an Indonesia-wide Citizen Science Network to support elasmobranch conservation through a mobile-reporting database. Elasmobranch Project Indonesia will work with other government and non-profit organizations in the region to coordinate the project and combine data across organizations, while also training youth to identify and report shark sightings and landings.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Portugal
Ocean Data, Literacy & Research
Filipa Vieira
M do Mar is an ocean literacy project that has 3 components: Menu do Mar which works with coastal restaurants to provide ocean literacy activities for kids at restaurants, Mães do Mar, (mothers of the sea) which promotes ocean literacy through rock pool experiences at schools, and Mar Profundo, a board game about deep sea ecosystem management.
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Startup
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USA
Blue Foods (Sustainable Protein, Fisheries & Aquaculture)
Mark Dahm & Rob Terry
Smart Catch offers a high-speed digital network for data collection and “eyes in the net” from the trawl net to the wheelhouse to the cloud.
LEARN MOREMicrogrant
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Brunei
Pollution Reduction & the Circular Economy
Shaima Misli
River Clean-Up Operation (RECOVER) is a collaborative community service project conducted by SOA Brunei, YSEALI and Save Kampong Ayer to gather solid wastes found along the Brunei River in Kampong Ayer (Water Village). This project aims to provide immediate short-term relief to solid waste discarded in the environment by engaging volunteers and the local Kampong Ayer community through the collective effort of a mass river clean-up.
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Startup
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United Kingdom
Pollution Reduction & the Circular Economy
Karen Scofield Seal & Charlie Bavington
Oceanium has developed a proprietary, green biorefinery technology to process seaweed into high demand products including plant-based food & nutrition ingredients (protein, fibre) and circular life-cycle materials. By “making the market” for farmed seaweed, Oceanium will catalyse the sustainable seaweed farming industry and pioneer the development of a new, environmentally friendly aquaculture industry in the Western Hemisphere and developing world.
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Startup
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Canada
Ecosystem Preservation & Restoration
Emily Charry Tissier
Whale Seeker's proprietary technology uses AI to speed up the analysis of remotely sensed images to detect whales. Their data help strengthen environmental impact assessments, support industry in complying with marine regulations, improve companies’ bottom lines, and ultimately help protect whales.
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