COASTAL FRONTLINE
Strengthening community resilience and securing tenure rights
Across the Majority World, coastal communities are facing climate impacts first and worst. When their rights and tenure are secured, and their voices amplified, they can protect their waters, defend their livelihoods, and lead locally rooted ocean-climate action at scale.
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The biggest, cheapest and fairest solution to the ocean emergency lies in mobilizing the billions of people who live alongside, and depend upon, our oceans. Resilient coasts, empowered communities and secure tenure are the foundations on which ocean-climate action is built.
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Philanthropy can channel flexible support via trusted regranting intermediaries to Indigenous peoples, fishers, and local organisations, ensuring funding flows to where it is needed most.
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Despite their critical role at the heart of our blue planet, coastal communities receive less than 1% of climate finance, and what little that does trickle down to them is in a form that they cannot readily use.
PROBLEM
Climate change impacts are profoundly unequal. Coastal communities in the Majority World are the least responsible for the crisis, but the first to feel its devastating impacts and the last to receive the resources they need to respond.
Their lives and livelihoods are under threat like never before from stronger storms, rising seas, dying reefs and collapsing fish stocks, with the worst still to come. At the same time, they’re facing intensifying pressure from industrial activity and overfishing, undermining fragile ecosystems, eroding customary rights and concentrating power and profit far from the frontlines.
Coastal communities have stewarded vast stretches of ocean for centuries, yet most funding never reaches them, leaving locally led efforts isolated, underfunded and unable to match the scale and speed of the threats they now face. The answer is to put power, rights and resources where resilience is built: in coastal communities themselves.
GRANTEES
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BLUE VENTURES
Blue Ventures’ Frontline Community Fund provides flexible funding and tailored technical support so frontline communities can restore marine life, improve coastal livelihoods and tackle the effects of climate change.
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TURNING TIDES
Turning Tides, a purpose-built tenure and rights regranting facility, centers power with small-scale fishers, fish workers, and Indigenous Peoples so they can secure marine tenure and steward their waters on their own terms.
OPPORTUNITY
The Coastal Frontline Initiative (CFI), a collaboration between Blue Ventures and Turning Tides, is designed to scale and sustain community-led ocean & climate action in the Majority World.
It tackles three critical barriers to scale: limited funding, limited access to tools and training, and limited community power and rights.
Together, these approaches localize funding, build movements, and deliver equitable and durable outcomes for climate, nature, and livelihoods at scale.
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200,000 km2
of coastal habitat under local management
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5m people
supported across 10,000 coastal communities
IMPACT GOAL
By 2030, the CFI will secure 200,000 km² of carbon-rich habitat under sustainable, locally led management that in turn supports the well-being, livelihoods, and food security of 5 million people across 10,000 coastal communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, West Africa, the Western Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.
It will also deliver a sea change in how philanthropy operates, shifting funding flows so that at least half reaches frontline partners and locally rooted organisations.
WHAT WE FUND
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![Northern lights over snow-capped mountains and ocean, night sky with stars.]()
ARCTIC CONSERVATION
Safeguarding ecosystems and Indigenous livelihoods
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![A man in a brown jacket and wide-brimmed hat is standing in a body of water, holding a large fish. Two boats are nearby in the water, with a backdrop of trees and a cloudy sunset sky.]()
BLUE CARBON+
Protecting and restoring mangroves, seagrass, saltmarsh and kelp
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![Two elderly people, a man and a woman, are repairing fishing nets. The woman is wearing a purple hijab, while the man is wearing a white shirt.]()
COASTAL FRONTLINE INITIATIVE
Strengthening community resilience and securing tenure rights
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![Aerial shot of a sandy coastline with clear green water and artisanal fishing vessels pulled up on the foreshore]()
MARINE CARBON REMOVAL
Responsible and inclusive ocean-based carbon removal
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![A white wind turbine against a clear blue sky.]()
OFFSHORE WIND
Enabling fast, fair & responsible development in emerging markets
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![A large cargo ship with colorful containers sailing in calm waters under a partly cloudy sky.]()
DECARBONIZING SHIPPING
Accelerating zero-emission fuels, ports and policy frameworks
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![Two fishermen sitting on traditional round basket boats on a beach at sunset, with fishing boats anchored in the background under a cloudy sky.]()
OCEAN-CLIMATE DIPLOMACY
Embedding ocean priorities in global climate policy
