Salesforce and Orraa Team Up on Blue Carbon

Financial , Insurance
14.04.2022 09:48 am

· Salesforce joins the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance

· Focus on developing fit-for-purpose blue carbon markets

Salesforce and the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) are joining forces - along with partners – to shape the development of a robust marketplace for blue carbon credits, it was announced today at the Our Ocean conference in Palau.

This week Salesforce announced a global collaborative effort aimed at driving consistent standards around high-quality blue carbon projects and credits. The effort is co-led by Salesforce and leading environmental organisations, including ORRAA, the World Economic Forum’s Friends of Ocean Action, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, along with the Meridian Institute to support the stakeholder engagement process.

In October 2021 Salesforce also launched a blue carbon programme to protect and restore ocean and coastal ecosystems. It is designed to help develop the nascent blue carbon market, and includes a goal to purchase 1 million tons of high-quality blue carbon credits, equivalent to more than $10 million USD, over the next four years.

Earlier this year, at the One Ocean Summit in Brest, France, ORRAA announced it was joining the Global Blue Carbon Coalition as a crucial step to help properly shape this market. 

Dr Whitney Johnston, Director of Ocean Sustainability, Salesforce, said: “We’re in a climate crisis that impacts everyone, especially for the most vulnerable among us, including many in coastal communities. More than half of global GDP is exposed to risk from the impacts of climate change. And it will only get worse unless we collectively take bold steps now to invest in nature-based solutions, including protecting and restoring critical ocean and coastal ecosystems, to fight climate change.”

ORRAA is working to ensure a comprehensive, aligned movement in this sector that is environmentally and socially sound, equitable and builds onto net zero commitments. It is also working on the “supply side” byhelping develop a pipeline of investable projects such Aqua-Farms Organisation (AFO) in Tanzania, a community-led solution that is one of the winners of ORRAA’s Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge that is shifting behaviours from destruction to conservation, by developing a voluntary carbon market which generates funds to be invested directly back into local facilities.

Karen Sack, Executive Director of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance, said: “At the moment there are too few on the ground solutions which can be a source for high-quality, verifiable blue carbon creditproducts ready to go to market, and no clear benchmarks or definitions of what a high-quality blue carbon product is – or should be. It is also important to develop demand-side guardrails to ensure that blue carbon credits are additional - not an alternative - to efforts to reach net zero. We are delighted that Salesforce is joining ORRAA and to be working jointly with them and other partners on this effort.”

This latest partnership with Salesforce also dovetails with ORRAA’s initiative, announced in February, leadingthe development of the Sea Change Impact Finance Facility (SCIFF) to address the need for a new globalocean finance architecture to deliver investment at scale. This includes the development of a Blue Resilience Clearing House to act as a marketplace within which to match potential investments with projects and to build investment into innovative products in blue carbon as well as resilience bonds, debt-for-nature swaps and other finance mechanisms.