The Third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3), held in Nice from 9-13 June 2025, convened over 14,000 delegates from 175 countries to accelerate SDG 14 (“Life below water”). Landmark pledges included action on marine protected areas, a Global Plastic Treaty, deep-sea mining moratoriums, and the High Seas Biodiversity Treaty. The conference ended with the Nice Ocean Action Plan, aiming to mobilise science, finance, and partnerships to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.
Itad and Oxford Policy Management held a side event at the conference on ‘Maximising Evidence for Ocean, Climate and Poverty Programming’. The discussion centered on the UK’s Blue Planet Fund (BPF)—but the lessons extend far beyond any single initiative.
The evidence gap: a conference-wide challenge
Throughout the week in Nice, we heard presentations about innovative ocean programmes, ambitious targets, and promising interventions. What we heard far less of was rigorous evaluation of what works (and what doesn’t). Few speakers presented evidence from systematic evaluations of their programmes. Even fewer discussed how they are using such evidence to support learning and adapt their approaches.
This isn’t unique to ocean programming. But given the complexity of ocean systems and the urgent need for effective interventions, this evidence gap represents a critical barrier to progress.
The Blue Planet Fund: a microcosm of broader challenges
The UK’s Blue Planet Fund (BPF) exemplifies the challenges and opportunities in ocean programming. Launched in 2021, BPF supports initiatives tackling marine pollution, climate change, sustainable seafood and livelihoods. With over 10 delivery partners and hundreds of downstream organisations, its portfolio spans everything from local grants in Peru to global work on ocean accounts.
This diversity and the resultant challenges for understanding collective impact mirrors the broader ocean programming landscape.
The BPF Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning facility: testing new approaches
To strengthen evidence generation and learning, the Blue Planet Fund has launched a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Facility.
The Facility has three goals:
- Track collective performance and impact
- Build the evidence base for ocean programming
- Embed learning across BPF and the wider sector
It will deliver evaluations and evidence reviews, align key indicators, and clarify how different programmes contribute to change at local, national, and global levels. Working groups are tackling tough measurement areas like poverty reduction, gender equity, and systems change.
The challenge: coherence vs. diversity
The question that drove the discussion in our side event was fundamental: How do we strategically focus programming while remaining locally responsive? This tension sits at the heart of ocean programming, particularly when working across diverse contexts—from Pacific Small Island Developing States to West Africa to Southeast Asia.
Our panel brought together representatives from various Blue Planet Fund programmes, each grappling with this challenge in their own way. What emerged was a rich conversation about the practical realities of implementing complex programmes across multiple contexts, partners, and objectives.
COAST is institutionalising learning through structured plans incorporating biannual partner coordination forums. Recognising a gap in gender and social inclusion, they developed a comprehensive ambition statement and worked with partners to build specific action plans.
The Global Fund for Coral Reefs balances global coherence and local adaptation by maintaining high-level investment principles while adapting to specific local threats. In the Mesoamerican Reef, they tackle wastewater pollution; in the Philippines, overfishing—different threats, same investment framework.
The World Bank’s ProBLUE programme showed how global learning can inform local solutions, citing their adaptation of South Africa’s rhino bonds for marine conservation in Indonesia. This client-driven approach has helped double the Bank’s ocean funding.
Structural barriers require systemic solutions
But programme-level innovation isn’t enough. We need sector-wide approaches to tackle systemic barriers.
The Global Plastic Action Partnership summarised the structural challenge as the “ABC” of planetary crises:
- Assessment gaps due to fragmented data
- Bandwidth issues with different ministries not coordinating
- Coordination problems despite numerous good initiatives
These dynamics frustrate collaboration and limit impact.
Audience questions highlighted another challenge: balancing accountability with local ownership. Over-reporting burdens partners and limits learning. Panelists offered solutions:
- Use secondary data where possible
- Embed monitoring and evaluation from the outset, not as an afterthought
- Facilitate peer learning between countries and partners
- Design simple, meaningful indicators
Why evidence matters for funding
SDG 14 is one of the least funded goals. An estimated $175 billion is needed annually to meet targets by 2030, but only $10–25 billion is currently invested each year—just 6–14% of the need.
Many at UNOC3 emphasised the need for increased investment—from public sources, private investors, and blended finance mechanisms. But without strong evidence of impact, attracting funding remains difficult.
This creates a vicious cycle: we need more funding to address ocean challenges, but we struggle to attract funding because we can’t demonstrate clear evidence of impact.
Breaking this cycle requires serious investment in MEL—not just to satisfy donors, but to make programming more effective and scalable.
Five takeaways for the ocean sector
Our session offered lessons not just for BPF, but the wider ocean community. Five shifts are critical:
- Make evidence central: Move evaluation and learning from the margins to the centre of programming—not just for accountability, but for effectiveness.
- Think at portfolio scale: Individual projects cannot address ocean complexity alone. We need approaches that manage interactions across multiple interventions, geographies, and time scales.
- Institutionalise learning: Replace ad hoc reflection with systematic processes for capturing, analysing, and acting on evidence.
- Build coherent frameworks: Strong theoretical foundations and clear strategic principles actually enable greater local adaptation and flexibility.
- Mobilise resources through evidence: In competitive funding environments, robust effectiveness data is essential for attracting resources to address ocean challenges at scale.
The stakes are too high for business as usual
As we face mounting pressures on our oceans from climate change, pollution, overfishing, the stakes are simply too high for business as usual. The ocean challenges are too complex, the contexts too diverse, and the resources too limited for approaches that aren’t grounded in rigorous evidence about what works.
The Blue Planet Fund’s approach to systematic learning offers one model for how the sector might evolve. But the broader challenge—moving from good intentions to evidence-based impact—requires action across the entire ocean community.
The future of our oceans depends on our ability to work together across boundaries, learn from each other’s experiences, and adapt our approaches based on evidence of what works. The ocean’s challenges are interconnected, and so must be our responses—including our commitment to rigorous evaluation and learning.
About the authors: Sierra Ison is Senior Consultant at Oxford Policy Management. Tim Ruffer is a Partner at Itad.
For more information about the BPF MEL Facility, please contact Jennie Thomas at Itad: jennie.thomas@itad.com
