In the latest policy brief, finance expert Arlette Schramm, unpacks how ocean accounts can provide key infrastructure to support the implementation and delivery of blue bonds.
Summary
- Despite growing investor interest, blue bonds face barriers to achieving scale. These include lack of standardised metrics to support verification, risk assessment complexities, economic barriers (indirect revenue capture mechanisms: e.g. structural challenge where the benefits of ocean conservation or restoration projects often don't flow directly back to the project or investors), capacity constraints, and policy gaps (current regulations lack comprehensive frameworks for valuing marine ecosystem benefits).
- Ocean accounts deliver standardised natural capital balance sheets that transform ecological metrics into financial intelligence. The accounts provide the basis for quantifying sovereign dependencies on marine assets, valuations, and auditable performance metrics—critical components for systematic asset class development.
- Ocean accounts can provide value added to next-generation blue bonds through standardising environmental data, enabling the development of consistent early warning systems that address verification challenges, support dynamic risk assessment instead of static evaluations, and create reliable revenue-tracking frameworks. This creates the potential to shift from the current pass/fail metrics to a dynamic risk management model, allowing investors to adjust terms based on ecosystem performance—particularly beneficial for small island developing states with limited financial resources.
- Integration of standardised data using ocean account methods delivers specific benefits to different stakeholders: issuers gain access to competitive interest rates through detailed risk calculations; investors experience reduced risk through reliable and standardised metrics; financial intermediaries benefit from streamlined due diligence processes; regulators obtain consistent frameworks to prevent greenwashing; and conservation organisations receive reliable outcome-linked funding—transforming what was
