Long before Pierre Paslier became an ocean entrepreneur, he was a plastics-packaging engineer, turning fossil fuels into the materials needed to ship and sell cosmetics. But he knew there had to be a better way. After taking a break from the corporate world, he went back to school and launched into an experimental phase with his co-founder Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez. In a makeshift kitchen lab, they played around with food materials trying to figure out which would do the best job at mimicking plastics. Before long, they hit on a clue: imitation caviar, whose tiny membranes are made from seaweed, behaved in some ways like the packaging they were trying to invent, providing the first spark for the idea that would spur investing in ocean conservation.

The company they founded in 2014, Notpla (think “Not Plastic”), eventually expanded to build a product line including takeaway boxes, flexible films, rigid cutlery, and seaweed-based paper. Perhaps more importantly, it joined a growing ecosystem of startups committed to simultaneously making use of ocean resources and supporting their conservation. Inspired by companies like Notpla, the bank Standard Chartered in 2023 wrote a white paper on seaweed, declaring it an investable asset category. Suddenly, capital began to flow to seaweed startups, investing in ocean conservation.

Today, more than $780 million has been invested in seaweed ventures, according to Phyconomy, a seaweed-investment tracker. “I see Notpla as a good visible application to make the case for why it’s worth spending more of our attention, brains, and dollars to the ocean space,” says Paslier about investing in ocean conservation. “There are a lot of solutions that are going to come from it in the future.”

Those solutions couldn’t come fast enough. Oceans face continued and deepening threats from humans, from overfishing to plastic pollution. Coral reefs are dying at such a clip that scientists warn of irreversible loss. At the same time, investing in ocean conservation faces the challenge of funding pullbacks from governments and nonprofits. The fractured geo-political landscape also hampers efforts to forge international conservation agreements, even though some big successes like the High Seas Treaty have moved forward. But some environmental advocates, alongside a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors, are coming around to a realization: position this threat slightly differently and it actually becomes an opportunity, investing in ocean conservation.

Read the full article about investing in ocean conservation by Justin Worland at Time.