Wednesday September 24, 2025
The Nature Conservancy —
The Global Ocean Innovation Challenge is a new partnership between The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Newlab, a venture platform. The challenge will incentivize startup organizations to design technologies and solve information gaps to address critical ocean conservation challenges. Together, we will source ideas from the greatest technology minds around the world and align them with real-world conservation needs in the water and on the coasts in close collaboration with local governments and communities.
The Challenge is being launched in Southeast Asia, home to more than 70% of the world’s coral reef species and a crucial source of food for 120 million people worldwide. Led by The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific region and with our Indonesia main partner, Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara (YKAN), the initial pilot projects are expected to focus on fisheries and marine protected areas (MPAs) in Indonesia.
Through the Global Ocean Innovation Challenge, we aim to accelerate the scale and impact of conservation solutions to combat the increasing threats to marine ecosystems including overfishing, lack of data to inform management strategies, marine habitat degradation and the loss of coastal resilience. Emerging technologies offer new ways to meet these challenges head-on, especially in contexts where monitoring and enforcement capacity is limited. This program aims to harness startup-led innovation to close the data and response gap to scale impact.
The Global Ocean Innovation Challenge combines TNC’s global conservation expertise with Newlab’s strength in building pilot-driven, scalable innovation programs.
Program Structure
The Global Ocean Innovation Challenge will roll out in two phases, each designed to accelerate the development and deployment of technology solutions for ocean conservation.
In the first phase, from now until early 2026, TNC field teams, Newlab and regional partners will collaborate to define priority conservation challenges, conduct discovery research and identify pilot sites.
The second phase, taking place throughout 2026, will focus on deploying selected solutions through three field pilots in Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on fisheries and marine protected areas (MPAs) in Indonesia.
These pilots will be launched in partnership with TNC and evaluated across ecological, operational and community impact dimensions. Insights from the pilots will inform opportunities for scaling across TNC’s global ocean programs.
The Challenge will culminate in a global showcase and a consolidated report, highlighting the solutions, outcomes and next steps for advancing ocean conservation through innovation.