Sustainable Ocean Alliance Grantees & Where They Are Now (Pt. 1)

Sustainable Ocean Alliance 's global network of grantees and fellows has been busy.?

Each day, they awaken to the impacts of the climate crisis within their local communities and witness with fresh eyes the disheartening degradation of their natural environments.

But rather than give up hope, they take action.

Our grantees know that innovative, collaborative interventions are required to have the lands and waters of their communities thrive once again in support of a healthy ocean and planet.

And at SOA, we know that a bottom-up approach provides the autonomy, flexibility, and location-specific support needed to help drive scalable impact.

So rather than micromanage our funding or its implementation, we empower young people to follow through on their proposed projects, making real-time decisions to best serve their communities and local environment, as supported by science and reported back on with astonishing, positive results.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to some of these inspiring and creative people and the solutions they’re implementing across impact areas and regions of the planet.

In this article, you will discover:

• Indonesian youth leaders planting mangroves
• A young marine scientist divemaster leading coral restoration in Tanzania
• How coding, hackathons, community efforts, and crowdsourcing are preventing pollution in Japan and globally
• How participating in a co-organized fellowship with SOA / Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is contributing to the well-being of women who subsist on sustainable, small-scale fisheries in Madagascar.

MANGROVE RESTORATION IN INDONESIA

Project leader INDRI ADDINI , along with her colleagues Muhammad Arvin Widatama and Mochammad Syahdiladarama , have been awarded multiple SOA grants over the years. The project goals have been to support the scaling of their ongoing blue carbon activities and mangrove restoration efforts via their organization PT Iklim Muda Sentosa (aka CarbonEthics ).?

I’m so proud to report that as the only organization implementing restoration in Dompak, Indonesia and the Pangkil Islands in Bintan, CarbonEthics has emerged as a pioneering force!

With SOA’s funding in particular, this team of inspiring young Indonesians is conducting a feasibility study, selecting a new restoration site, establishing a mangrove nursery, enhancing waste reduction infrastructure, and expanding overall capacity to continue this important work.

With additional support from the World Resources Institute and the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry, they’re also continuing to plant over 2,000 mangroves per month.

CORAL RESTORATION IN TANZANIA

Supported by her colleague Jerry Geofrey Mang’ena , Nancy Iraba is the SOA grant project lead at Aqua-Farms Organization - AFO .?

Receiving training from The Nature Conservancy ’s Reef Resilience Network and the NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration , she is Tanzania’s first marine scientist divemaster to lead coral restoration.?

AFO is using their SOA grant to take a community-based approach to restore Tanzania's Buyuni Reef. This crucial reef is home to a nursery and breeding site for vulnerable fish species. In recent decades, it has also been severely damaged by climate change and harmful fishing practices, leading to the loss of diverse coral species—and the reef's economic and ecological function.

In early 2022, a large swath of Buyuni Reef was designated as a locally managed Marine Protected Area (MPA). Under Iraba’s leadership, the community is now replanting 1,000 coral fragments across 400 square meters of Buyuni, with a goal of restoring 1 square kilometer (more than half a mile) of reef by 2030.

WATER REFILL APP IN JAPAN

Robin Takashi Lewis and Mariko McTier co-founded a free tech resource called mymizu .?

Their platform identifies locations where people can refill reusable bottles, rather than purchasing single-use bottled water (hence the nod to “mizu,” meaning “water” in Japanese).

And in 2022, their productive hackathon (in partnership with a leading coding school, creative agency, and tech experts) helped expand their reach, building an open-source web app (download here ).

SOA’s grant will enable the app to be further developed and improve the quality of the crowdsourced data, currently available to hundreds of thousands of users at no cost.

To date, mymizu has helped raise awareness of over 11,500 refill locations across Japan with 2,250 partner stores serving as refill sites and more than 200,000 global refill locations identified with the help of crowdsourced information.

They aim to double partner stores to 5,000 by 2024 and are currently exploring growing chapters in Vietnam, Kenya, and Ethiopia (all dedicated to their core ethos of fostering community and the coordinated actions of many to drive positive change for the planet).

mymizu will also put its awarded funds towards developing “Action Packages”— self-organizing roadmaps to help city governments, nonprofits, schools, universities, and companies build engaged communities around more ocean and planet-positive initiatives.

FISHERIES IN MADAGASCAR

Rasolofoarivony Nestin is a fellow in the 2023 Global Cohort of the Leadership for Climate-Resilient Fisheries Fellowship. A program launched by Sustainable Ocean Alliance and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the fellowship empowers this young marine biologist to oversee technical advances across the island nation’s southwest fisheries.

By working with primarily women fishers of Toliara, Madagascar to collect real-time data on fish populations, small-scale fisheries managers are now able to evaluate the overall health and maturity of local fish populations, as well as identify any species on the rise or decline.

Through the digitalization of the collected data, effective management measures have been put in place to ensure sustainable fishing practices and sustain the livelihoods of the local community as well as promote the conservation of marine resources.?

BONUS

1. FOLLOW: Inspired by these noteworthy initiatives of grantees and fellows across geographies and backgrounds?

Please be sure to give these emerging, young ocean leaders and their projects a follow (tagged above)!

I have no doubt that as more individuals and organizations learn of their work, they’ll be met with more public and private sector investment and support to help scale their efforts.

2. KEEP UP TO DATE: If you appreciated this article and want to keep up with the climate and ocean space, subscribe for more of my content updates using the “bell” icon in the upper right of my profile.?

3. APPLY: Lastly, if you or someone you know is interested in applying for the 2023 U.S. cohort of SOA's Leadership for Climate-Resilient Fisheries Fellowship, apply here by Sunday, September 24: https://www.soalliance.org/climate-resilient-fisheries-fellowship