Following the growing momentum behind the Blue NDC Challenge, launched by France and Brazil to encourage countries to integrate ocean-based mitigation and adaptation into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), attention is increasingly turning to how marine solutions can be embedded within national climate and biodiversity frameworks. Seaweed has emerged as a promising candidate, with potential to contribute to mitigation, adaptation, ecosystem recovery and more sustainable feed systems.
CFI spoke with Melanie Cueff, Scientific Officer at the Global Seaweed Coalition, and Vincent Doumeizel, Senior Advisor on Oceans and Food to the United Nations Global Compact, about why integrating seaweed into Nationally Determined Contributions, biodiversity strategies and national adaptation plans is now a strategic priority. The interview explores the governance, finance and monitoring frameworks required to move seaweed from policy ambition to responsible scale:
Integrating seaweed into NDCs, NBSAPs and National Adaptation Plans is a core mission of the Global Seaweed Coalition. Could you explain what these mechanisms are, and why they matter?
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the climate action plans that countries submit under the Paris Agreement, updated every five years. They set out emission reduction targets and, increasingly, adaptation strategies. NBSAPs (National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans) fall under the Convention on Biological Diversity. They define how each country intends to conserve biodiversity, restore ecosystems, and meet the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets, including the ambitious goal of protecting 30% of land and ocean by 2030. NAPs (National Adaptation Plans) help countries identify medium- and long-term adaptation needs, with a focus on the most vulnerable sectors and communities.
What makes seaweed particularly interesting is that it addresses all three mechanisms at once. And when we say "seaweed," it's worth remembering that we're talking about a remarkably diverse group of species with very different characteristics.
On the mitigation side, seaweed enables the production of lower-carbon products, including biomaterials, biostimulants, and livestock feed additives. These are tangible pathways for decarbonising supply chains. For biodiversity, seaweed farms and restored beds create critical habitat for marine species, absorb excess nutrients, and support coastal ecosystem recovery. That feeds directly into the 30x30 targets embedded in NBSAPs. When it comes to adaptation and coastal resilience, seaweed cultivation can protect shorelines, boost fishery productivity by providing nursery habitat, and diversify livelihoods for coastal communities, all priorities that belong in National Adaptation Plans.
The economic and social benefits are just as significant. Seaweed aquaculture creates jobs and alternative income streams for coastal populations worldwide. The sector has tripled over the past two decades, now exceeding 35 million tonnes and accounting for half of marine aquaculture production by volume. Demand keeps growing for biostimulants, fertilisers, sustainable packaging, and feed ingredients across agriculture, industry, and the circular economy.
For NBSAPs specifically, we recommend that countries include targets to conserve and restore coastal marine habitats while promoting sustainable seaweed farming as a biodiversity-positive activity. At the same time, appropriate safeguards are needed: managing genetic resources, preventing invasive species risks, and spatial planning to avoid trade-offs with wild habitats.
What are the essential elements for high-quality seaweed integration that a country must include for it to deliver real impact through an NDC or national plan?
Countries must move beyond broad mentions and include clear targets, safeguards, financing mechanisms and monitoring frameworks so that seaweed becomes an implemented, measured and funded nature-based solution. We identify five essential elements for this integration.
First, countries must define precisely what seaweeds will deliver, whether mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity benefits, livelihoods, or ideally all four. This requires including specific targets, indicators and timelines, such as hectares restored, jobs created, nutrient removal levels, or carbon sequestration co-benefits. Countries should also identify the value chains being supported, whether biostimulants, feed additives, biomaterials, or food security applications. The principle here is straightforward: what gets measured gets financed and implemented.
The second element involves robust sustainability safeguards, including spatial planning to avoid displacing sensitive habitats or conflicting with fisheries, biosecurity rules for non-native strains, disease control and genetic resource governance, as well as community participation and benefit-sharing mechanisms. Such safeguards protect ecosystems and ensure social legitimacy for the sector’s expansion.
We also need clear implementation pathways and enabling policies. Countries need a regulatory framework that recognises seaweed as a nature-based solution and a legitimate climate and biodiversity action. This includes streamlined permitting to encourage responsible investment, along with support for research and development, startup incentives, and coastal community capacity-building. Without these enabling conditions, national ambition never reaches the water.
The fourth element requires a financing strategy linked to national and international funding streams. There must be explicit links to climate and biodiversity finance mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and multilateral development banks. Countries should also develop domestic co-financing arrangements and private-sector participation models, supported by clear justification of cost-effectiveness and socio-economic returns. Real deployment requires real money.
Finally, we need a comprehensive approach to monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV). Seaweeds lack verified MRV protocols to quantify how much atmospheric carbon they can remove. Much scientific work still remains to be done, as quantifying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) by seaweed systems is very complex compared to soil- or sediment-based ecosystems like mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass.
Countries need metrics for climate outcomes, including carbon cycles and substitution benefits, biodiversity recovery, resilience gains, employment creation and gender inclusion. These must be integrated into national transparency frameworks and supported by data-sharing platforms to enable adaptive management, ensuring accountability, credibility and the foundation for future scale-up.
Seaweed is often described as a proven but under-regulated and under-financed solution. What are the most immediate governance or regulatory gaps countries need to address before they scale?
Start with governance. Seaweed tends to fall between fisheries, environment and agriculture ministries, with no one clearly in charge. It needs to stop being an institutional orphan. Countries should designate a lead agency with a clear mandate. Closely tied to this is the question of space: farmers won't invest without secure tenure, and where marine spatial planning is absent, conflicts with fisheries or tourism stall everything. Provisional zoning and simplified leases can bridge the gap while more comprehensive plans take shape.
Then there's permitting, which in some jurisdictions drags on for years. A one-stop, risk-based process would unlock pilots and community enterprises far more quickly. But speed shouldn't come at the expense of safety. Scaling without proper biosecurity controls risks the introduction of invasive species or disease outbreaks. National seed strategies, traceability systems and quarantine protocols aren't optional. The same applies to environmental safeguards more broadly: simple, enforceable rules are needed to prevent ecological harm, including basic monitoring of biodiversity and water quality as cultivation expands.
On the market side, harmonised product regulations may be the single most critical bottleneck. There's no global Codex standard for seaweeds, so every country invents its own food safety rules, creating trade barriers, unpredictable approvals, and stalled innovation. Aligning national frameworks with emerging international guidance and recognising traditional safe uses would open markets. Novel products like feed additives, biostimulants and biomaterials face a related challenge: producers often can't figure out which authority to approach. Transparent, fast-track registration pathways are essential to attract investment.
Underpinning all of this is the need for credible data. To access climate and biodiversity finance, the sector must demonstrate ecosystem benefits, nutrient removal, habitat value and livelihood impacts. Community farms need help getting started with guarantees, microgrants, concessional loans, ideally tied to environmental safeguards.
Climate finance flowing to aquatic foods remains extremely limited. What does an effective ‘blue finance’ model for seaweed look like, especially for smallholders and early innovators?
Of all the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 14 “Life Below Water” has historically received the least public financing. The encouraging news is that investment in a sustainable ocean economy has gained considerable momentum over the past decade, with aquaculture emerging as a priority area for impact capital. However, seaweed producers, particularly smallholders, continue to struggle to access the finance they need. The sector requires debt financing to address cashflow mismatches, modernise operations, expand capacity, and build resilience to climate impacts, yet it faces persistent challenges in accessing appropriate capital.
An effective blue finance model for seaweeds must address the specific circumstances of smallholders and early-stage innovators. The most promising approach involves blended finance structures that combine public and philanthropic capital with private sector investment. This means deploying concessional or first-loss capital to de-risk investments and thereby crowd in private finance. Models such as the Global Fund for Coral Reefs demonstrate how UN-led grant windows can work effectively alongside private equity windows to support businesses that deliver positive outcomes for marine ecosystems, including seaweed enterprises.
For smallholders specifically, accessible entry-level instruments are essential. These include microgrants and starter funds for community-level operations; concessional loans with flexible repayment terms aligned with harvest cycles; guarantee schemes that enable small producers to access commercial credit; and aggregation models that allow smallholders to pool resources and share risk. Without such instruments, the benefits of sector growth will flow disproportionately to larger, better-capitalised operators.
Revenue diversification represents another critical component. Returns should come not only from the sale of commodities such as seafood and ingredients, but also from ecosystem services. Enterprises should explore how to monetise benefits, including water quality improvement and biodiversity benefits.
Countries must also establish explicit connections between seaweed development and international climate and biodiversity finance. This means incorporating seaweed into Green Climate Fund proposals, Global Environment Facility programmes, and multilateral development bank lending portfolios, and positioning the sector for emerging ocean-focused funds. The whitepaper 'Financing Regenerative Seaweed and Aquaculture,' developed by Systemiq in collaboration with the Global Seaweed Coalition and Planet Ocean Capital, provides pathways for establishing these connections.
It is important to recognise that finance alone is insufficient. Smallholders need accompanying technical assistance, including business development support, training on sustainable practices, market linkages, and guidance on navigating regulatory requirements. Experience consistently shows that pairing capital with technical assistance dramatically improves success rates.
Finally, risk transfer mechanisms deserve greater attention. Parametric insurance for aquaculture operations can reduce downtime following adverse events, accelerate ecological recovery after extreme weather, and protect livelihoods. Such instruments essentially transform sustainable seaweed farming into an insurable, investible resilience service, making the sector more attractive to mainstream capital providers.
The One Ocean Partnership aims to mobilise USD 20 billion by 2030 for regenerative seascapes and 20 million blue jobs. How can the seaweed sector position itself to access this capital?
The One Ocean Partnership, launched at COP30 in Belém, establishes a global network of Regenerative Seascapes designed to accelerate regenerative ocean action. Its ambitious targets of USD 20 billion in investment and 20 million blue jobs by 2030 represent a substantial opportunity for the seaweed sector, but accessing this capital will require strategic positioning.
The sector must first demonstrate clear alignment with regenerative principles. The seaweed sector must articulate compellingly how seaweed cultivation actively restores ecosystem health, enhances biodiversity, improves water quality, and provides nursery habitat for marine species. The framing must move beyond minimising harm to actively delivering positive environmental outcomes.
Given the target of 20 million blue jobs, the sector must also present credible projections for employment creation across the entire value chain, encompassing cultivation, harvesting, processing, product development, distribution and support services. The global seaweed sector already supports millions of livelihoods, predominantly in Asia, and expansion into new regions offers significant employment potential, particularly for coastal communities and women who already play a dominant role in the sector in many countries.
Capital flows toward bankable opportunities, which means the sector needs to develop investment-ready projects. This requires building a pipeline of well-structured projects with clear business models, credible offtake arrangements, appropriate risk mitigation, and transparent impact metrics.
The sector should also leverage the momentum created by the Blue NDC Challenge. With 17 countries now committed to integrating ocean-based solutions into their Nationally Determined Contributions, the policy environment is increasingly supportive. The seaweed sector should work closely with governments to ensure that seaweed is explicitly included in national climate plans, which in turn unlocks access to associated finance mechanisms.
17 countries have now joined the Blue NDC Challenge. Looking ahead, if countries successfully embed seaweed into their next NDCs and national frameworks, what would success look like by 2035 for climate action, food systems and coastal communities?
If seaweeds are successfully embedded into NDCs and national frameworks over the coming decade, we would expect to see transformative outcomes across three interconnected dimensions by 2035.
Regarding climate action, seaweed would be recognised globally as a legitimate nature-based climate solution with verified contribution pathways. Countries would include quantified seaweed targets in their NDCs, supported by robust monitoring, reporting and verification systems. The sector’s role in decarbonising agriculture by replacing synthetic fertilisers with biostimulants, transforming livestock systems with seaweed-based feed additives, and developing sustainable materials through biomaterials and packaging would be mainstream rather than niche. International ecosystem services accounting methodologies would incorporate seaweed-derived benefits, enabling integration into climate finance mechanisms.
Regarding food systems, seaweed would be established as a significant component of sustainable nutrition globally. Harmonised international food safety standards, including through Codex Alimentarius, would facilitate trade and market access. Seaweed-derived ingredients would be commonplace in human food, animal feed, and agricultural inputs. Critically, this growth would be achieved sustainably, with biodiversity-positive practices, community benefit-sharing, and ecosystem safeguards built into governance frameworks from the outset rather than retrofitted after problems emerge.
For coastal communities, millions of livelihoods would be supported by seaweed cultivation, processing, and associated value chains, with particular benefits for women, who already play a dominant role in the sector across many regions. Communities would have secure tenure and access rights in coastal waters, underpinned by clear regulatory frameworks that protect both their interests and the environment. Alternative income streams would reduce pressure on overfished stocks and provide resilience against climate shocks affecting traditional livelihoods. Coastal ecosystem health would be measurably improved in areas with well-managed seaweed operations, including better water quality, enhanced biodiversity, and restored nursery habitats that support broader marine productivity.
Achieving this vision requires action now. In that perspective, the Global Seaweed Coalition has been instrumental in the launch of the United Nations Global Seaweed Initiative (UNGSI) during the 80th UN General Assembly, spearheaded by Madagascar, France, and Indonesia, with the support of United Nations entities. First presented at the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference, following a recommendation from the 5th United Nations Ocean Forum, the Initiative aims to become the leading global platform for policy coordination, capacity building, and advocacy for the seaweed sector, ensuring its potential is fully realised for the benefit of people and the planet.
