Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Chief Executive Rupert Howes has announced that the organization will make a USD 6.4 million (EUR 5.6 million) investment in its Ocean Stewardship Fund by 2030.
Since its inception in 2019, the Ocean Stewardship Fund has channeled USD 8.8 million (EUR 7.7 million) into over 200 fisheries and projects worldwide, nearly 90 of which were in developing economies. The fund’s main goal is to end overfishing, but it also supports a wide variety of initiatives that make fisheries more sustainable.
When the MSC announced the Ocean Stewardship Fund in 2019, it set a goal of raising USD 10 million in support of these projects. By 2023, it had raised its goal to USD 100 million. The fund is supported by both profits from MSC-labeled seafood and third party sources.
Howes announced the new funding commitment at the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference, which took place from 9 to 13 June in Nice, France. The event brought numerous world leaders together to discuss threats to the vitality of the world’s oceans and hammer out the details of a multinational treaty aimed at protecting ocean biodiversity.
In a press release about the news, MSC said that U.N. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, Life Below Water, remains the least funded of all of the U.N.’s 2030 goals, receiving less than 0.01 percent of total sustainable development funding.
