Great Bear Sea Project Finance for Permanence — Indigenous-Led Marine Conservation Trust

Seventeen First Nations on British Columbia's north and central coast negotiated with the Government of Canada and the Province of British Columbia to secure durable, long-term financing for marine conservation under the Northern Shelf Bioregion Marine Protected Area Network Action Plan, closing the Great Bear Sea Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) on June 25, 2024.

The deal provides $335 million in initial funding: $200 million from the Government of Canada, $60 million from the Province of British Columbia, and $75 million from Canadian and international philanthropic funders. The money is split across a $167 million Marine Stewardship Fund (endowment), a $120 million Community Prosperity Fund and a $48 million MaPP Implementation Fund (both disbursed over 20 years), all administered by Coast Funds, an Indigenous-led conservation finance organisation.

The financing supports 2.8 million hectares of new and enhanced marine protected areas within the 10.2-million-hectare Great Bear Sea, targeting 30% protection of the bioregion and contributing an estimated 0.3 percentage points toward Canada's national 2030 marine conservation target.

Funders point to the 2007 Great Bear Rainforest PFP — a separate, earlier terrestrial deal — as a precedent: that programme is credited with over 1,400 permanent jobs, 140 new or acquired businesses, $444 million in coastal investment and 18 Indigenous Guardian programmes. The marine PFP explicitly reuses that governance model, and a 2026 'lessons learned' review by ESSA Technologies documents the design choices behind it, but the marine deal itself only closed in 2024, so independently measured ecological outcomes are not yet available.

No blue-carbon sequestration or storage figures have been published for the initiative to date; its case rests on governance design and funding transparency rather than on measured biodiversity or carbon results so far.

Read the full analysis: https://www.canada.ca/en/fisheries-oceans/news/2024/06/great-bear-sea-project-finance-for-permanence.html