Post date 2 Mar 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 2,125 words
SEASCAPE is a poem written by Bruce Springsteen that, along with a paragraph entitled MY LADY, was his first published writing. It was printed in the April 1969 edition of Seascape, the literary magazine of Ocean County College. The poem was erroneously attributed in print to “Bruce Sprengsteen” (who he?!)
There’s a shift happening in the marine economy that still sits below the radar of most mainstream climate and nature discussions. For years, the dominant question for offshore sectors was straightforward: how do we reduce environmental harm? That remains essential. But a new question is starting to take hold alongside it. How do we leave marine ecosystems in a measurably better state than we found them? That sounds subtle, but it really isn’t.
For ports, shipping companies, offshore wind developers, cable operators, insurers, lenders, and infrastructure investors, it points to a world in which marine nature is no longer treated as a soft externality or a planning constraint to be managed at the margins. It starts to look much more like strategic infrastructure. Something finite, functional, economically productive, and increasingly central to resilience.
That is why the publication of IMCA’s biodiversity guidance, Scotland’s Blue Carbon Action Plan, the continued development of Marine Net Gain thinking in England, and broader discussions around blue carbon matter so much when read together. Individually, each is important. Collectively, they signal a change in direction. Not towards a niche conservation agenda per se, but rather towards a new operating logic for the offshore economy.
Nature at sea is becoming legible as infrastructure
The most useful way to read this shift is not through the language of ESG, still less through the language of corporate philanthropy. It is through the language of infrastructure.
Marine and coastal ecosystems regulate water, buffer storms, reduce erosion, support fisheries, store carbon, sustain biodiversity, and underpin local economies. In that sense, they already perform infrastructure functions. The difference now is that policy, science, and finance are starting to catch up with that reality.
This is especially important in the UK, an island nation, where the water story is becoming impossible to ignore. Too much water brings flood risk. Too little brings drought stress. Too dirty brings pollution, regulatory pressure, and political backlash. Coastal and catchment systems sit right at the centre of that picture. If you restore them well, you are not simply creating environmental uplift. You are reducing risk across real assets, supply chains, communities, and balance sheets.
That is perhaps the deeper significance of Scotland’s Blue Carbon Action Plan. It is not just a climate document, but rather tt is a sign that marine ecosystems are beginning to be treated as strategic natural assets that need to be understood, protected, and in some cases restored as part of a wider resilience agenda.
IMCA’s move matters because it changes what ‘good practice’ looks like
IMCA’s new guidance is important not because it has suddenly invented marine biodiversity management, but because it helps normalise a change in expectations across contractors, clients, developers, and the wider offshore supply chain. The old mindset was largely defensive. Avoid damage where possible, minimise it where you cannot, compensate if required. That won’t cut the mustard anymore. The new framing points beyond mitigation towards contribution.
That has practical consequences. It suggests that biodiversity and ecosystem function should shape project design much earlier. It pushes operators to think not only about compliance, but about how routing, methods, construction techniques, noise, disturbance, sediment impacts, monitoring, and post-build stewardship affect marine systems over time. It encourages a move from one-off surveys and mitigation plans towards something more like adaptive management.
That matters because once this logic enters procurement, consenting, and finance in the marine world, it stops being optional. It becomes part of what competent delivery looks like. For offshore wind and subsea cabling in particular, that is a material shift. A sector that has often framed itself, understandably, through the lens of decarbonisation will increasingly have to show that its build-out model is also compatible with the recovery of marine nature. Climate benefit on its own will not always be enough.
Scotland’s Blue Carbon Action Plan is also timely for a good reason
The most striking thing about Scotland’s Blue Carbon Action Plan is not that it is enthusiastic about blue carbon. Many people are. It is that the plan is careful, and I would argue that in the face of shifting scientific data and understanding, that caution is a strength. Rather than treating blue carbon as a ready-made market category waiting to be scaled, the plan is much more grounded in evidence, policy integration, habitat understanding, and practical delivery. That matters because blue carbon has quickly become one of those terms that can attract a lot of excitement before the governance, measurement, and science are mature enough to support the claims being made.
Scotland’s approach suggests a more credible sequence. First, understand the habitats. Improve mapping and condition data. Clarify how blue carbon habitats sit within marine policy and planning. Build the evidence base for action. Then work out where restoration, protection, and finance can be mobilised with integrity.
Overall, this approach feels about right. If marine ecosystems are to be treated as assets, then the objective cannot simply be to generate a creditable narrative around them. The objective has to be to protect and restore the underlying functions that make them valuable in the first place.
Marine Net Gain brings the biodiversity logic into sharper focus
This is where the possibility of Marine Net Gain (MNG) in England becomes especially relevant. MNG is not yet a fully operational regime in the way terrestrial Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) now is. But the policy direction is clear enough to matter. DEFRA has already consulted on the principles, published the response, and established that the question is no longer whether marine development should leave the environment better off in principle, but how such a regime could work in practice.
For me, that has two immediate implications. The first is operational. Developers and their advisers would be unwise to assume that they can wait for the final rulebook before changing behaviour. In practice, expectations begin to move long before regulation hardens. Planners, regulators, NGOs, local communities, and counterparties start asking different questions. Baselines become more important. Monitoring becomes more important. Longer-term ecological outcomes become more important.
The second is financial. Once a net gain logic is even partially on the table, nature-related obligations begin to look more like liabilities that must be understood, governed, and funded over time. That changes the conversation for lenders, insurers, and investors.
The temptation is to think of MNG as just another environmental requirement. It may prove to be something more consequential than that. It may become a mechanism through which marine nature is gradually, properly priced into project economics.
The blue carbon trap
This is also the point at which a note of caution is essential. Blue carbon is real, and the science matters. Coastal and marine habitats can store very significant amounts of carbon, and the destruction of those habitats can release stores accumulated over long periods. But there is a growing risk that blue carbon becomes over-marketed before the science, accounting, and governance are robust enough to support the claims. That has the potential to be a trap.
Once carbon becomes the headline product, there is a danger that the ecosystem itself becomes secondary. The project is judged by the tradable unit rather than by whether it actually protects habitat, improves ecological condition, reduces flood and erosion risk, strengthens fisheries, or supports local communities. While locally important, is also matters how it contributes to the system. In that world, blue carbon risks becoming another story about abstraction, monetisation, and distance from the underlying asset.
The safer and more useful framing is different. Blue carbon should be seen as one dimension of the value of healthy coastal ecosystems, not the sole reason they matter. Protection and restoration should be pursued first because these systems are critical natural infrastructure. Carbon may strengthen the case. It should not be allowed to distort it.
I believe that this matters enormously for corporate strategy. Buying credits or leaning too heavily on carbon claims is not the same thing as contributing to marine recovery. If anything, it risks undermining credibility. The stronger approach is operational and place-based: reduce pressures, restore function, monitor transparently, and where payments for ecosystem services emerge, tie them to genuine resilience outcomes and long-term stewardship rather than to easy narratives.
What this means for the marine economy
For ports, this points towards a broader conception of asset stewardship. Harbours and estuaries are not just logistics nodes. They are ecosystems with sediment dynamics, habitat dependencies, water quality issues, and exposure to climate risk. The port of the future will need to show not only that it is efficient, but that it is resilient and ecologically literate.
For shipping, the challenge is more dispersed but no less real. Biodiversity impacts linked to noise, routing, ballast, chronic pollution, invasive non-native species and operational practice are likely to come under sharper scrutiny. The question will increasingly be whether operators can demonstrate that they are reducing pressure on sensitive marine systems, not merely complying with minimum rules.
For offshore wind and cabling, the implications are perhaps most immediate. These sectors sit at the centre of the energy transition, but they also interact directly with seabed habitats, species disturbance, cumulative impacts, and contested marine space. That makes them the place where the old ‘climate good, therefore acceptable’ logic is most likely to break down. The future belongs to developers who can build quickly and credibly, with marine nature treated as part of project design rather than as an obstacle to be compensated later.
For finance, the opportunity and the warning are both clear. The opportunity lies in supporting investible models that treat marine restoration as long-duration resilience infrastructure, backed where possible by contractual payments from beneficiaries such as ports, utilities, coastal authorities, insurers, and corporates exposed to physical and regulatory risk. The warning is that not every blue carbon or nature narrative will deserve capital. In this space, discipline matters. Additionality matters, monitoring matters, governance matters, and coastal community benefits matter. The institutions that mistake rhetoric for risk reduction will eventually get found out.
From extraction to resilience
The deeper significance of all this is that it hints at a broader shift in economic logic.
For a long time, marine development has largely been organised around extraction, use, and mitigation. Build the asset, minimise the damage, and move on, but that’s not going to cut it anymore. What is emerging now is a more demanding proposition. Build and operate in a way that restores the capacity of the underlying system to keep delivering value over time. That is a very different idea of prosperity.
It is place-based rather than abstract. It is aligned with resilience rather than depletion. It creates scope for long-term service contracts around avoided losses, improved water outcomes, biodiversity recovery, and adaptation benefits. And it opens the door to a more mature form of natural capital investing, one rooted not in hype, but in the measurable performance of ecosystems that people, communities, and economies actually depend on.
What looks today like a set of disconnected developments, an industry guidance note, a Scottish action plan, a possible English policy regime, may turn out to be the early architecture of a new offshore settlement. One in which nature is not an afterthought, but part of the operating system. The winners in that world will not be the firms that tell the best story about marine nature. They will be the firms that learn how to work with it, pay for it, and help regenerate it in ways that are credible, investible, and grounded in place.
References
IMCA news release on biodiversity guidance. (imca-int.com)
IMCA technical library entry for “The role of marine contractors in biodiversity impact and nature-positive developments”. (imca-int.com)
Scottish Government publication: Scottish Blue Carbon Action Plan. (Scottish Government)
Defra consultation: Consultation on the principles of Marine Net Gain (June 2022). (GOV.UK)
Defra supporting document: Consultation on the Principles of Marine Net Gain (PDF). (Defra)
Defra outcome: Government response on Marine Net Gain (December 2023). (GOV.UK)
Defra outcome: Summary of responses on Marine Net Gain (December 2023). (GOV.UK)
Richard Buxton Solicitors, “Marine Net Gain Proposal (2022): An Overview” (January 2025). (Richard Buxton Solicitors)
Defra consultation on Biodiversity Net Gain for NSIPs, noting provisions to allow Marine Net Gain to be made mandatory in future (May 2025, PDF). (Defra)
UK Parliament, Environmental Audit Committee report “Governing the marine environment” (June 2025). (publications.parliament.uk)