Blue bonds for marine conservation and a sustainable ocean economy: Status, trends, and insights from green bonds

Abstract

Amid funding shortfalls to address ongoing ocean degradation, blue bonds are being designed to finance sustainable development and conservation projects in ocean and coastal areas via private sector investment. Blue bonds seek to deliver both positive environmental and/or social impact alongside a financial return on investment to investors. However, there has been limited academic scrutiny of these early initiatives to evaluate whether this rhetoric is justified. This article leverages 15-years of scholarship on green bonds to develop an analytical framework that is applied to five of the world’s first blue bonds. A comprehensive content analysis of sources such as blue bond project documents and secondary interviews is used to synthesise their characteristics, and consider trends related to their thematic scope, geographical scope, environmental impacts, and financial returns. Thematically, blue bond proceeds are channelled towards projects aligned with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 ‘Life Below Water’, the Blue Economy, and policy discourse around the ‘blue recovery’ from covid-19. These projects range from marine protected area (MPA) creation, to improved fisheries management, and potentially, oil and gas exploration. However, greater explanation of the logic through which project activities are expected to deliver impact and returns is warranted. Equally, impact measurement is often underwhelming, with many bonds targeting easy-to-measure outputs (e.g., area conserved) rather than outcomes and impacts (e.g., increases in fish abundance). While an alluring and useful financial innovation, greater disclosure on the individual projects and enterprises that blue bonds finance is necessary to validate their sustainability credentials and inform investor decision making.