World Bank2025-03-252025-03-252025-03-17https://hdl.handle.net/10986/42987Africa’s coastal and marine areas face growing challenges. Protecting the continent’s natural assets and the services they provide is not just a moral imperative; it is also a chance to obtain higher economic yield by, for example, adding value to fish products in Mauritania, using mangroves as a shield for rice paddies from storm surges in Guinea, using the clean coastal environment for tourism, as in Senegal, and generating new jobs by moving from destructive to productive practices, so enabling countries to access to blue carbon finance. Introduction Protecting the ocean is not only a moral imperative; it is also a financial opportunity. Ocean financing needs to move beyond an extractive, inequitable business-as-usual approach, which sees activities undertaken with little regard for negative environmental, economic, and social impacts that threaten long-term development, to align economic development opportunities with ocean health in a way that fosters low-carbon, resource-efficient growth, creates jobs, and reduces poverty. Enabling such a transition requires significant upfront investments, firstly to understand current trends and emerging threats through technical assistance, and secondly to formulate appropriate governance, fiscal, and financial policies, as well as investment solutions. In many cases, financing is available. However, it is not always available at the right time or place. The time and effort required to request (and then wait for approval of) finance can also be prohibitive. In some cases, projects are isolated from each other or are not shovel-ready, and continuity is not achieved. The Challenge Despite the wide acknowledgment of their importance to global development and environmental health, the world’s oceans are threatened by mismanagement, the effects of climate change, and poorly understood interactions within and between oceanic and terrestrial sectors. Investments in oceanic development are often isolated to individual industries, exacerbating conflicts over resources and space. To realize this potential, African countries need access to finance that spans grant financing, debt relief, and equity financing. As a range of financing instruments are made available, there is a need to shift from separate, isolated investments in individual sectors to a more integrated, holistic ridge-to-reef approach. There is a need for cohesive, systematic management of marine and coastal areas. The World Bank is available to help countries with mobilizing capital for investments. It also provides technical support and learning from its portfolio of more than US7 billion dollars of ongoing investments in oceanic and ocean-related sectors. These investments take various forms, including concessional and non-concessional loans, blue bonds, marine conservation endowment funds, carbon credit, parametric insurance, and debt for climate swaps. The real challenge lies in operationalizing solutions and articulating the need to engage financiers to catalyze a truly collaborative effort to reach the common objective of keeping coastal and marine areas pollution-free and productive.en-USCC BY-NC 3.0 IGOWELL-BEINGCLEAN WATERCOASTAL AND MARINE CHALLENGESBLUE CARBON FINANCENATURAL ASSETS PROTECTIONCLIMATE ACTIONBriefWorld Bank10.1596/42987