Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to support private investment in ocean recovery.

Ocean conservation and the protection of marine biodiversity is a global challenge and one that is critically underfunded. Through the UK’s £500m UK aid Blue Planet Fund and in line with the 10 Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity and the International Development White Paper, we are supporting innovative projects that aim to attract and scale up private investment in ocean recovery. These initiatives include restoration and protection of blue carbon habitats and increasing coastal community resilience, funded through programmes led by the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (£13.9m), the World Bank’s sustainable blue economies programme- PROBLUE (£37.5m), and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs (£33m), amongst others. In June 2023, Lord Benyon hosted a joint UK-GFCR Investors Roundtable event, which showcased the GFCR as a viable investment opportunity and supported investor mobilisation for the GFCR Investment fund. At 28th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP28), the GFCR Coalition announced the mobilisation of more than $200 million USD as an initial direct investment toward the newly established 2030 Coral Reef Breakthrough targets, these include mobilising $12bn for corals and protecting 125,000 km2 of corals (50% of ~250,000km2 global total) by 2030.

As set out in Mobilising Green Investment: 2023 Green Finance Strategy, we are also taking action to meet our target to raise £1bn in private finance into nature’s recovery in England every year by 2030, both on land and at sea.