In this Q&A, Rare President Caleb McClennen, Ph.D., interviews Karen Sack, Executive Director of the Ocean Risk and Reliance Action Alliance (ORRAA), as the organization marks its five-year anniversary. Part of Rare’s Rethinking Conservation series, this conversation builds on the need to view people as central to solving the biodiversity and climate crises. Through discussions with forward-thinking experts, the series explores innovative strategies and collaborative solutions that empower communities, advance conservation, and redefine our relationship with nature.
To kick off International Women’s month, let’s talk about gender equity. ORRAA has championed innovative finance solutions to build resilience in coastal communities, including for women who face significant barriers to accessing capital, leadership roles, and decision-making power in ocean conservation. What prevents their full participation?
Karen: The starting point for any discussion on this is to think about how many women are involved in this space—because it’s staggering.
Forty-five million women play some role in small-scale fisheries globally, about 40% of the total workforce.
We know that climate change amplifies existing gender inequalities. Research shows that when there are natural disasters, women and girls are more adversely affected, with much higher death rates after extreme storms. In part, it’s because they might not know how to swim, or stay behind to look after their families rather than get to safety.
Putting those two things together and adding a third — the inequalities built into the economic system — paints a troubling picture. Women in this sector earn as little as 64% of men’s wages for the same work. It blows your mind.
What can we do to address these obstacles?
Karen: The fact is, we need to incorporate gender dynamics into everything we do. That means enabling women to access resources and financial opportunities and participate in decision-making. This is part of the reason we’ve partnered with the Stockholm Resilience Centre to create a global set of Women in Fisheries fact sheets highlighting women’s vital roles across fisheries value chains.
What does it all look like? We must build leadership and communication skills for women and men to work together. We must remove barriers to education, financial resources, and insurance and develop financial literacy across communities, particularly for women and girls, so they can create strategies that build resilience. We have to address gender equality and build these cornerstone elements if we’re going to construct a regenerative and sustainable ocean economy marketplace that works for our common future.
Rare has been doing this through their work, and we’re excited to be developing livelihood insurance products together for small-scale fishing communities in the Philippines.
Tell me more about livelihood insurance products and other innovative financial tools or investment models you think are effective in supporting women-led conservation efforts and sustainable fisheries.
Karen: Fishing is a dangerous occupation. If a fisher has life insurance, their family is protected if something happens to them. It also helps prevent them from turning to destructive fishing practices or catching species outside the sustainable “green list” to recover lost income from missed fishing days.
But here’s the key: this important work doesn’t start with the insurance product — it starts with listening to, learning from, and then working with these communities to understand their needs. You [Rare] are really good at that.
We’re also working on two other projects integrating innovative finance solutions to build resilience. In Tanzania, Seaweed Women, a collaboration with Aqua-Farms Organization (AFO) and Sea Power, supports a community where 88% of seaweed farmers are women. We’ve introduced tubular net seaweed farming technologies, microcredit, and savings schemes, enabling them to invest in equipment and increase earnings while farming more sustainably. They have learned to swim, gained financial literacy, developed independence, and learned to create value-added products like soaps and food, keeping more economic benefits within the community and their households.
In South Africa, Abalobi empowers women as fisheries quality controllers, working alongside the men in their communities to ensure more sustainable catches. Their use of traditional knowledge reinforces sustainable fishing and safeguards the community’s livelihood. Importantly, they are now paid for their work, gaining authority in their communities and addressing gender disparities.
Can any of the examples you gave be scaled for impact?
Karen: All the examples I gave are game changers. In this instance, scale means expanding beyond these pilot proof-points to coastal fishing communities worldwide. It also means looking at opportunities like Rare’s world-first small-scale fisheries impact bond (which ORRAA and others are supporting) so that we can move to scale more quickly. Critical to help scale-up support and impact are de-risking through insurance products that provide financial security; economic empowerment, supporting women in sustainable livelihoods like seaweed farming; and strengthening community governance, giving women authority in fisheries management.
Here’s the thing: We need hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the space now, everywhere. There’s no denying that. But that doesn’t mean throwing a lot of money at it. It means building these examples out around the world because if we can’t get these small investments into communities where they can be adequately absorbed and help those communities stay intact and build their economic, social, and cultural resilience, then it doesn’t matter how much money we throw at the problem. So, it is as much about the how as the what.
The blue economy has gained traction as a framework for sustainable ocean development, but many communities still struggle to access financing. Beyond gender equity, how can we ensure that ocean finance is truly inclusive — empowering local fishers, Indigenous groups, and small-scale entrepreneurs?
Karen: Two things are really key. One is how we define a regenerative and sustainable blue economy. ORRAA has been working with our partners to identify six regenerative and sustainable blue economy sectors, and our work shows an average opportunity, per year to 2030, of $550 billion into these sectors. This offers investors a clear pathway to secure returns in sectors like sustainable seafood and aquaculture, ocean-based renewables, ridge-to-reef projects like sanitation and waste management, blue tech and the circular economy, and marine conservation. These are the clear opportunities to deliver the blue economic transition towards climate and nature-positive investments that help future-proof the global economy for communities large and small, and we should grab them with both hands.
The second is how we apply that definition practically. For example, we’ve worked with a group of our partners, including WEF, Salesforce, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy, with participation from about 50 of our members, to develop the High-Quality Blue Carbon Principles and Guidance. The idea is to identify the baseline principles and guidance needed to create that marketplace, which includes empowering local fishers and communities, engaging Indigenous groups, and ensuring that the benefits from any financial products flow back into the community. With Conservation International, we’ve developed a Practitioners’ Guide that helps ensure that these principles are applied correctly and tested in practice. This allows us to see if they’re working for the community.
It’s essential to build these financial products with high integrity from the beginning. That includes community engagement, listening to local and indigenous knowledge, and ensuring science underpins our investments.
Rare and ORRAA share a commitment to community-driven conservation. What lessons have you learned about making these efforts successful across philanthropy, the private sector, and governments?
Karen: Rare has been an ORRAA partner from the very beginning. We now have over 114 members from governments, multilaterals, the finance and insurance sectors, academia, and civil society. The idea behind the alliance is to bring these different thinkers and leaders together to solve problems collectively.
Radical collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We know that a conservation organization like Rare might be trying to develop an insurance product for small-scale fishers but may not know an insurance broker to approach. If we bring those folks to the table, open the door to discussions, and develop a product that Rare can share with the alliance, suddenly, someone on the other side of the world says, “Hey, we could do that too,” and Rare helps them build it. This is how we scale, build, collaborate, and create an ecosystem that works.
From the start, we’ve been turning ideas into action with key stakeholders. This ethos is crucial because we have no time left. The climate challenge is the most challenging crisis humanity has ever faced, compounded by the biodiversity crisis, pollution, and now geopolitical issues reshaping everything we know.
Our collaborative network shows that although we might not always agree, we can listen, engage, and develop solutions together. If we keep doing that, we can change the world for good.
And that’s incredibly inspiring.
Read more about ORRAA’s impact over the last five years in its 2024 Action Report.