There is an urgent need for increased long-term funding to support effective ocean conservation action. Mainstream ocean conservation efforts struggle to halt and reverse the decline in ocean health, while the ocean’s most reliable custodians—the people and communities who have long depended on it for sustenance—have often been overlooked and disenfranchised in efforts to protect it.
Synchronicity Earth is pleased to launch the Neptune Fund, established in collaboration with the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), to provide a source of vital, targeted funding for critical yet overlooked and underfunded marine conservation challenges. The Neptune Fund is an expendable endowment fund enabling donors to provide long-term support to locally-led and grassroots organisations working at the forefront of ocean conservation.
Marine funding skews heavily towards grant recipients in North America and large conservation organisations, despite the fact that locally-led work is one of the most effective and equitable way to achieve conservation goals. According to the ‘Funding the Ocean’ marine philanthropy tracker, 70 per cent of grants between 2020 and 2022 served the North America region, compared to one per cent for Oceania.
The Neptune Fund will work to redress this imbalance by providing long-term, core funding to effective, locally-led conservation in the Global South. Initially, the fund will focus mainly on Southeast Asia, Melanesia and the East Indian Ocean, regions with exceptionally high levels of marine biodiversity, but which face key gaps in resourcing.
