Incubating the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA)

• Between 2019 – 2024, GRP incubated the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) through fiscal sponsorship, innovation, MEL, communications, and operational support and capacity building.
• Through GRP, ORRAA received funding from the Government of Canada and UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). 
• To date, ORRAA has directly invested into 40 projects to develop finance/insurance/policy products, which supported approximately 180,000 climate vulnerable  coastal people.

ORRAA

The Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) was launched in 2019 with the aim of creating the first of its kind multi-stakeholder alliance on ocean risk. As a convener, it unites insurers, banks, governments, academia, philanthropies and civil society to channel finance towards the Ocean and climate vulnerable coastal communities. Specifically, it pioneers ground-breaking finance products that incentivise blended finance and private investment into these regions. ORRAA aims to drive at least $500 million of investment into coastal and ocean nature-based solutions by 2030. 

Over the course of its existence, ORRAA has been successful in growing its membership and funding, bringing attention to coastal resilience to policymakers and civil society, investing in and scaling innovative finance products, and establishing itself as an independent entity. Since 2020, ORRAA has leveraged member contributions (monetary as well as in-kind) that drive innovation and investment into ocean resilience. 

Significance

ORRAA is a truly unique initiative as a result of its ocean and finance focus. As is characteristic of GRP Initiatives, ORRAA emerged from a gap in the resilience space around multi-sector collaboration and ocean resilience. This strategic positioning has enabled it to gain a high profile on the global scene, thus promoting the concept of ocean risk at the COP and Ocean conferences. It has also opened GRP to new approaches to resilience, extending its reach beyond land-based habitats and gaining access to private sector players, specifically insurers and other financial institutions.

Furthermore, ORRAA’s approach to innovation, bridging novelty and scale, is based on GRP’s innovative approach. Its Challenges enable it to spot new initiatives, support and accompany them to reach scalable positions within the market. This practical approach to innovation has enabled it to maximise the pipeline of innovation in the resilience space and bring about true change to local coastal and ocean communities. Examples include insurance products and training for small-scale fisheries in the Philippines, empowering women to undertake the restoration of mangrove forests, or the development of a blockchain-based digital platform providing real-time data on the seaweed production value chain.

Contribution

As ORRAA’s incubator, GRP played, and continues to play, a valued role in its success. At its creation, hosting ORRAA within GRP’s organisational structure helped expedite the Alliance’s creation, allowing it to focus on its mission, providing it with access to government funding, and sharing both resilience and organisational expertise, and operational systems support. GRP continues to be an active contributor to ORRAA’s work, as a member of its Secretariat and major contributor to the Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge (ORIC). 

ORRAA’s emerging independence from GRP is another of its strengths, making it a model of sustainability for other initiatives. Drawing on support from GRP and embeddedness in the ocean community, ORRAA was able to develop in a dynamic way and gain independence. This autonomy, combined with the small size of its Secretariat, has promoted agility in the projects it undertakes and partners it works with. At the same time, ORRAA continues to work closely with GRP, drawing on its strengths in terms of innovation and MEL.

GRP was instrumental in helping to secure funding for ORRAA, as well as in building ORRAA’s grant management track record. ORRAA, through GRP, has received financial support from the Government of Canada and the Alliance’s governance and operational structures have been implemented. The Canadian grant was successfully completed in February 2022 and a further commitment was made directly to ORRAA. In 2021, funding has been provided to ORRAA through GRP by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), with project implementation completed by June 2022, and final reporting completed by September 2022. In March 2023, DEFRA committed further funding to ORRAA through the Blue Planet Fund. The grant has also been managed by GRP during 2023, with a view to fully transfer the grant management and its implementation and reporting over to ORRAA in 2024. 

GRP will continue to be an active contributor to ORRAA’s work, as a member of its Secretariat and major contributor to the Ocean Resilience Innovation Challenge (ORIC). The Challenge, which launched in 2020, aims to identify and nurture investable projects driven from the ground-up, delivering a genuine impact in local communities and more broadly.