The ocean and its resources are being depleted, polluted, and over-exploited. While many groups – from governments, philanthropy, development banks to NGOs – are working hard on the issue, there are still big gaps. Fishers and first-line businesses struggle to access resources and coordinate solutions.

Shaping Innovation Futures is an exploratory project seeking to understand how we might accelerate the necessary transformation to navigate the next 30 years, and realise better futures for people, places, and the planet. Beyond specific solutions, the project focused on the underpinning conditions that enable us to organise, create, and act systemically.

The recently released Discovery Report makes a case for greater investment in systems innovation and the functions that enable it.

Systemic challenges like healthy oceans, accessible and clean energy or inequality are complex and hyperconnected and require systemic responses. Investing in singular solutions won’t achieve the scale of change the world needs right now. Experimenting with flexible capital and systems finance is where philanthropy must direct its creativity next.

The project brought together a cohort of systems-thinkers and doers to jointly explore pioneering systems initiatives to understand why and how such initiatives are developed, how they operate, how they evolve, what skills are needed for this work, what support lifts them, and what barriers they face.

One of the initiatives, Future of Fish, acts as an intermediary, building human centred solutions that transform coastal economies for the sustainable use of ocean resources. In Southeast Asia they’re working on a Blended Finance platform and Market Development for shrimp farmers to finance improvements, stay competitive, and stave off poverty.

Read the full article about sustainable coastal economies by Athanasia Price at AVPN.