LocationsWhy the Blue Economy and Coral Reefs Matter for the Pacific Region
May 7, 2026
By supporting the work of sustainable fisheries, UNDP is combating harmful fishing practices in Papua New Guinea.
What if the most powerful piece of climate infrastructure in the Pacific is not a seawall, a solar panel, or an early warning system, but a coral reef?
For Pacific Island Countries, where coastal ecosystems buffer communities from storm surge, sustain fisheries that feed families, and underpin economies that have no viable inland alternative, protecting nature is not an environmental choice, it is a climate finance and resilience decision. And it is one the Pacific has been making, at community level, long before the global development community caught up.
As Pacific leaders prepare to gather at the Pacific pre-COP in Fiji this October as well as the Melanesian Oceans Summit in Papua New Guinea this May, the Pacific's message is this: nature-based solutions are not a complement to climate action. They are climate action. The question is no longer whether to invest in them. It is whether global finance mechanisms will move fast enough, and reach deep enough, to match the scale of what is already being built on the ground.
Global frameworks are part of that architecture. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement represents an important step toward protecting the high seas ecosystems that regulate ocean health, sustain migratory fish stocks, and support the reef and coastal systems Pacific communities depend on. But frameworks alone do not protect a reef or finance a community marine area. What does that is investment: patient, blended, and locally grounded, of the kind that the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and its partners are helping to build across Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
Shark Reef Marine Reserve; absence and depletion of shark numbers will reflect various stages of degraded reefs, which support little to no biodiversity as species simply cannot thrive in compromised conditions
The Blue Economy: Linking Global Protection with Local Prosperity
The blue economy is often framed as an economic opportunity. In the Pacific, it is something more fundamental than that, it is a climate resilience model. Healthy oceans are not a precondition for prosperity somewhere down the line. They are the precondition for survival now. Every reef-positive livelihood, every community-led marine area, every sustainable fishery is simultaneously a climate investment, absorbing risk, buffering coastlines, and keeping food systems intact when everything else is under pressure.
Across Fiji, community stewardship is proving that nature protection and climate resilience are the same investment. The Shark Reef Marine Reserve shows what this looks like in practice, a community-led model where conservation generates sustainable revenue through eco-tourism while actively safeguarding the marine biodiversity that coastal livelihoods depend on. Protection and prosperity, financed together.
That model is being deepened through the recently established Beqa Adventure Divers Dive, Research and Conservation Compound in Pacific Harbour, bringing together tourism operations, marine science, and conservation under one roof. The compound houses the Fiji Shark Lab, the country's first biological field station dedicated to shark and ray research, conservation, and education. Science, economy, and ecosystem health treated not as competing priorities but as a single system.
Beyond Beqa, the Investing in Coral Reefs and Blue Economy programme, supported by Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GFCR) and Joint SDG Fund, is operationalising Fiji's first dedicated Blue Lending Facility with the Fiji Development Bank, putting climate-resilient finance directly in the hands of reef-positive businesses and coastal communities. These are not pilot projects. They are the architecture of a nature-based economy that can be financed, replicated, and scaled. Global frameworks like BBNJ reinforce this work at the governance level — but it is locally grounded investment that turns ecological protection into lived resilience.
Benefits of the protections combined with enforcement, has seen an exponential growth in the specifies of fish and increase in sighting of bull sharks.
Papua New Guinea: Scaling Nature‑Based Climate Finance from Reef to Market
In Papua New Guinea, where reef ecosystems sit at the crux of food security, coastal protection, and local economies, investing in ocean health is a climate resilience strategy aligned with both COP31 priorities and the BBNJ agenda. This approach is operationalised through the GFCR-supported Gutpela Solwara, Gutpela Bisnis (Good Oceans, Good Business) programme, embedding reef protection directly into enterprise development.
Under the Blue Economy Enterprise Incubation Facility, 11 community‑based reef positive businesses are supported through a Blue Accelerator Approach, combining technical assistance, catalytic start‑up grants, and conservation conditionality. Supported enterprises operate across sustainable fisheries, eco‑tourism, and marine value chains, delivering livelihoods while safeguarding coral reefs and coastal ecosystems critical for climate adaptation.
The programme functions as a bridge to blended finance. Establishment of a loan guarantee facility with Women’s Micro Bank – Mama Bank – will de‑risk lending and crowd in domestic capital for reef‑positive enterprises. These businesses demonstrate that nature‑based solutions are not peripheral to climate action; they are investable, scalable, and already delivering resilience on the ground.
Climate change, pollution and harmful fishing practices pose the greatest threat to Papua New Guinea’s unique coral reefs.
UNDP’s work across the region shows that protecting the ocean is not a barrier to development, it is a prerequisite for it. Nature protection is a climate finance priority, it is a resilience investment, and COP31 has explicitly recognised it as such.
The Pacific is not asking to be included in that conversation; it is already demonstrating what this looks like in practice.