Rising Tide: Are Companies Ready for the Ocean Accountability Era?

The Third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC 3) will take place in Nice, France, from June 9–13, 2025. The event seeks to address long-overlooked issues around ocean protection and biodiversity.

Key topics include:

• Ratifying the Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) treaty
• Tackling destructive practices like bottom trawling
• Securing up to $100 billion in funding for marine conservation

‍

Oceans: The Overlooked State of Nature

Despite the centrality of oceans to planetary health, most sustainability assessments to date have focused on land-based impacts,dependencies, and opportunities. Oceans remain the "last frontier" when it comes to understanding and assessing company's interface with nature. Yet despite that, it is every bit as suitable for structured analysis and benchmarking as other issues, with the right tools.

This makes the marine domain well-suited for corporate accountability and it's an area where Responsible Capital can offer valuable insight into how companies are performing and where they’re falling short.

A High-Level Industry Check-In

Using the upcoming 2026 WBA Ocean Benchmark as inspiration, we conducted a very preliminary assessment of 60 companies identified by WBA as potential candidates for future evaluation. These span a range of ocean-impact sectors—maritime transport, seafood, cruise lines—as well as adjacent industries like agriculture, chemicals, and pharma.

The assessment was conducted on 21 questions across governanceand ecosystem and biodiversity performance categories, with a few questionslimited to only topic relevant sectors. Each question is broken down into 4 to5 sub-questions, focused in on a) general reporting, b) targets, c) progress,d) ambitions and then sometimes e) an additional topic-unique feature.

For example: a) The company reports its plastic use, yes orno. b) The company publishes time-bound targets to reduce plastic use, yes orno. c) The company demonstrates progress on reducing plastic use, yes or no. d)The company provides evidence that it is free of single-use plastics, yes or no.e) The company demonstrates that it has adopted circular solutions for plastics,yes or no.

For this simple version, each sub-question result is scored as 1 for true and 0 for false, with average results then informing the overall assessment.

Key Takeaways:

• Material Risk Disclosures Lead: As with broader nature-related reporting, companies are strongest in identifying high-level risks, impacts, and dependencies (if less so opportunities). These are often 'low hanging fruit', readily completed using standard frameworks and the easiest boxes to tick.
• Geographic Variations: Among the small sample considered, China performed weakest across all assessed areas—a trend very typical of other ESG domains. Norway also seemed to somewhat underperform, at least on this limited overview, a little more surprising.
• Best Performers (on paper): Names faring relatively well included the likes of Henkel AG, Evergreen Marine Corp, and Royal Caribbean Cruises. Interestingly, Adani Ports scored well on this disclosure and commitments basis—despite high-profile controversies—echoing the same contrast seen in many of its ESG ratings.
• Areas of most Weaknesses: Invasive species management Biodiversity targets Implementing mitigation measures (or AR3T type frameworks) Plastic usage (especially single use) and marine wildlife disturbance Concrete elements within many sub-topic - time-bound targets and measurable actions
• Sector-Specific Gaps: For shipping-related: Time-bound targets for spills/hazards; assessments of abandoned/discarded materials; use of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) For seafood: Weakness in addressing Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing across supply chains

Conclusion

The real test will come with the full WBA Ocean Benchmark in 2026 and we can revisit to dig into some of the more interesting specific details and examples. The full benchmark will cover hundreds of companies with clearer, more detailed pass/fail criteria that will help narrow down on the details and be a little less forgiving.

That said, the early patterns are already emerging here and they highlight where greater scrutiny and engagement is needed: companies tend to perform well on generic commitments and risk identification. But when it comes to measurement, target-setting, and mitigation of specific marine impacts, the performance is patchier—and it's here where the biggest real-world improvements can be made.

‍