Sending a water sample to the lab tells you what happened, not what is happening. A way around it is to use paper strips and portable monitoring devices, but they don’t cover everything. For example, in my last few months as Trade Effluent Manager at Wessex Water, PFAS in wastewater was starting to become a really hot topic. PFAS are a family of toxic, highly persistent contaminants, the ones you hear called “forever chemicals”. Lots of ongoing discussion around how to regula

Here is a quick breakdown of the lessons and tactics I got out of my latest podcast interview with Chris Gorell Barnes from Ocean 14 Capital. A sort of “just tell me what to do” version, if you are building in the blue economy. 1 - Plug into what already exists, don’t build from scratch Chris thinks that the biggest opportunity to drive growth in the blue economy is to transition the established, proven businesses to become more modern, digitalised, and sustainable. In practi

Most ocean protection runs on government aid and philanthropic foundations. Jeremy McKane, CEO of OCN.ai, thinks the only way to make protection permanent is to make it pay for itself. Turning marine protected areas into revenue centres. It was the first day of the World Ocean Summit in Montreal. I had just arrived at the venue and was having a coffee when I bumped into Jeremy. Coincidentally, we had both just received a text from a mutual friend, saying something along the l

Ocean founders: this is how go-to-market is different for you, and why it is harder to scale. A basic go-to-market strategy is essentially made of these steps: 1. Understand who your ideal customers are (Target Market) 2. Craft your unique value proposition for them (Message) 3. Find out how best to reach them (Distribution) 4. Define how to package and price your solution (Business Model) 5. Select the best ways to execute, measure and iterate (Tactics) However, for ocean st

We're used to thinking that nature only has value when we extract it. Dead trees become timber. Living nature, by default, doesn't get a price. Ralph Chami has a different view. Ralph is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Green Future. He spent 25 years at the International Monetary Fund, before turning his focus to valuing living nature as an asset class. When we spoke at the World Ocean Summit in Montreal, he explained the gap that started his work: "Kill a whale, chop it to pi

Why is ocean tech stuck at the pilot stage? The myth is that more innovation is needed, but the solutions already exist. They are just not being adopted as standard. Emily Charry Tissier has a clear answer as to why that is the case. Emily is the CEO and co-founder of Whale Seeker , a company that uses AI to detect marine mammals from drone, aircraft and satellite imagery. She recently wrote about this in the Journal of Ocean Technology, and when we spoke at the World Ocean