Policy & Governance · Philanthropy

Bloomberg Ocean’s $260 Million and the Gap Between Protected Ocean and Managed Ocean

Bloomberg Philanthropies has put $260 million behind the least glamorous part of ocean conservation: making protected areas actually work. Here is what that money can buy, what it cannot, and what I would like to see next.

By Giacomo Abrusci | Founder and Executive Director, SEVENSEAS Media

When Bloomberg Philanthropies announced $260 million for the next phase of the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative in June, at the Earthshot Prize Impact Assembly in London, I read the release the way most people did: for the number, which brought its total ocean giving to $635 million, and then I moved on. This month, with COP31 in November and the High Seas Treaty’s first Conference of the Parties due soon after, I went back and read it again, this time for the verbs. They are “implement”, “manage”, “enforce”, “finance”, “monitor”, and neither “designate” nor “announce” appears once. For a funder of this size, that is a deliberate choice, and I think it is the right one.

SEVENSEAS Media, the small nonprofit you are reading this on, supports the people who do this work for a living. Most of them are not the ones at the podium when a marine protected area is declared. They are the ones who inherit it afterwards: the fisheries officer with one patrol boat, the NGO staffer writing the management plan, the graduate student doing the baseline survey that should have happened five years ago. So when a funder says the problem is no longer the pledge but the follow-through, I want to know what that means in practice, and where the money stops.

The number that matters is not 10 per cent

Bloomberg frames its commitment around the 30×30 target, and the release links to SkyTruth’s tracker showing that countries have now committed roughly 10 per cent of the ocean to some form of protection. That milestone got its share of headlines this spring. The figure our readers should keep in their heads is a different one. Marine Conservation Institute’s Marine Protection Atlas, which grades protected areas on whether they are actually implemented and what they actually prohibit, put fully or highly protected ocean at 3.3 per cent as of March 2026. The Institute’s 2024 assessment of the hundred largest MPAs, which together account for around 90 per cent of reported coverage, found roughly a quarter of that area unimplemented on the water and a third open to activities it considers incompatible with conservation.

So the honest picture is not “10 per cent protected, 20 to go.” It is closer to “3 per cent working, 7 per cent on paper, 20 to go.” The distance between those two numbers is exactly what Bloomberg says it is now funding, and to its credit the release says so plainly: many areas “still lack effective management, enforcement, and long-term financing.” That is not a line you usually find in a funder’s own announcement.

What the money is pointed at

The release lists five areas of work, and stripped of the announcement language they come down to this. Helping governments create and manage protected areas and reform fisheries in their own waters. Paying for the satellite tracking, open data platforms and machine learning that let anyone see who is fishing where; the partnership with Global Fishing Watch that produced the first open map of the world’s industrial fishing fleet is the model here. Supporting the first marine protected areas under the High Seas Treaty. Funding legal, technical and policy capacity so that small coastal and island states can hold their own in negotiations and then deliver on what they sign. And backing science, local leadership and pilot work on restoring damaged coral reefs, building on the 50 Reefs+ analysis that identified 165,922 square kilometres of reef across 71 countries with the strongest chance of surviving warming.

The partner list is long: Blue Ventures, Rare, Oceana, Oceans 5, Campaign for Nature, Global Fishing Watch, SkyTruth, Earth Insight, Pristine Seas, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Aga Khan Foundation and others, with new country work in the Marshall Islands, Mexico and the United Kingdom. What strikes me is how much of that list is made up of organisations whose product is either a management plan, a dataset, or a community with the legal standing to manage its own fishery. Those are the unglamorous things. Nobody cuts a ribbon on a compliance regime.

What $260 million cannot buy

The high seas are where the ambition is highest and the constraints are hardest, and the constraints deserve stating plainly. The treaty entered into force on 17 January this year, and about one per cent of the high seas currently has any protection at all. The first Conference of the Parties has to meet within a year of that date. But COP1 is a rule-setting meeting. The German environment ministry’s own summary says no protected areas will be established there; what gets decided is how proposals are made, assessed and adopted. The first actual high seas MPA is further off than the announcement language suggests, and each one needs the parties to agree.

Then there is the question of who is bound. The United States signed the treaty in September 2023 and the Biden administration sent it to the Senate in December 2024. As of the Congressional Research Service’s January 2026 update, the Senate had not acted on it, and I have found nothing since to suggest that has changed. A high seas protected area applies to vessels flagged to parties; a fleet flagged elsewhere is a matter for its own government. Philanthropy can fund the science, the proposal and the monitoring. It cannot ratify a treaty on anyone’s behalf, and it cannot make a non-party comply.

Closer to shore, the risk is reversal. Mongabay reported in April that the Institute expects recent US decisions to allow commercial fishing in four large Pacific marine national monuments to knock 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points off the global fully and highly protected figure if they survive legal challenge. That is a fifth of the effective total, gone with a policy change in one country. Management money helps a protected area function; it does not stop a government from changing its mind.

What I would like to see next

Since the stated goal is implementation, I would like implementation to be what gets reported. The initiative’s track record, as described in its own release, is stated in square miles strengthened, reefs protected and policies advanced. Those are fine measures of designation. The measure that would match the new ambition is the Marine Protection Atlas one: how many square kilometres moved from proposed to implemented, and from lightly to highly protected, in places where Bloomberg money was involved. Bloomberg Philanthropies already funds the Marine Protection Atlas, alongside Oceans 5 and others, so this is a yardstick it has helped pay for. Reporting its own results against it would be unusual for a funder, which is precisely why it would carry weight.

I would also like to know how the capacity funding reaches the people who need it. The release speaks of small coastal and island nations; the partner list is mostly international organisations. Both can be true, and often the international group is the delivery channel. But the fisheries officer with one boat, and the local organisation that has been doing community-led management for a decade on a shoestring, need a way in that does not run through a Washington or London office. If there is one, it is worth publishing.

Two dates will show us a lot. Bloomberg Philanthropies has said it will convene partners around the Ocean Pavilion at COP31 in Antalya this November, with ocean governance, marine protection and ocean-climate finance among the priorities. And the High Seas Treaty’s first COP is due by mid-January. Between them we should learn which high seas areas are being lined up first, who is paying for the proposals, and what the monitoring plan is once the ink is dry. SEVENSEAS will be following both, and if the team behind this initiative wants to talk through any of it with the people who read us, our door is open.

The full Bloomberg Philanthropies announcement, including the partner list and partner statements, is at bloomberg.org. The Marine Protection Atlas and its methodology are at mpatlas.org.

About the author

Giacomo Abrusci is the founder and Executive Director of SEVENSEAS Media and the main on-camera host of its video work. He has worked in ocean conservation for more than two decades, in Washington, DC, Bangkok and Munich, and now writes from Milan.

About SEVENSEAS Media

SEVENSEAS Media is an independent nonprofit publication, newsletter and jobs platform for the global ocean conservation community, fiscally sponsored by The Ocean Foundation and based in Washington, DC. It has listed ocean jobs online since 2004, which as far as we are aware makes it the longest-running jobs list and professional development resource in the ocean sector, and it remains among the largest and most active of its kind. Its weekly newsletters reach more than 50,000 subscribers, the site draws more than 80,000 page views a month, and its readership spans every country and territory that Google Analytics records. Readers are working conservation professionals, early-career researchers, policymakers, students and storytellers, and the archive of more than 2,000 articles has been written by over 5,700 contributors from the field. SEVENSEAS works with more than 150 partner organisations across media, academia, nonprofits and foundations, and everything it publishes, including the jobs board, is free to use, funded by reader donations and partnerships rather than a paywall.

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