Q&A with Alexis Grosskopf of Ocean Innovation Africa
We spoke with Alexis, co-founder of Ocean Innovation Africa, ahead of a workshop on marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) at the organisation’s annual summit on March 23-25th 2026.
Q1: Your workshop tackles marine carbon removal from an African perspective. What’s the core problem you’re trying to solve?
The climate needs carbon drawdown. Even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, it would take decades for the atmosphere to adjust. Marine CDR is one of the most promising pathways, given that 70% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, and the volume of the ocean dwarfs anything on land.
But Africa faces a specific risk: becoming a test site for mCDR projects without adequate safeguards or fair benefit-sharing. Africa can be too easily bought sometimes. If a large corporation can pay a coastal community $200,000 a year to pour iron into the water where they normally fish — disproportionately higher than what they’d earn from fishing — that sounds like a good deal. Until it isn’t. Excess iron fertilisation can deplete oxygen, which would devastate the underwater ecosystem. The community gains short-term income and loses long-term ocean health. That’s the trap we want to avoid.
Our watchword for the workshop is simple: don’t trade health for wealth.
Q2: Why focus on engineered mCDR rather than nature-based solutions like mangroves?
Nature-based solutions are valuable — they build ecosystem services and create community stewardship. But the scale of carbon we need to remove means they can only be part of the answer. Even if coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass meadows fully recovered tomorrow, the natural drawdown would cover only a marginal share of what’s needed.
There’s also a subtler problem. Planting mangroves where they used to grow won’t always work, because climate change means they’ll no longer grow there. Some communities have received carbon credits for mangrove projects that never actually drew down meaningful carbon — the trees simply didn’t thrive. We shouldn’t blame them; it’s about building better frameworks.
So yes, we have to look at engineered solutions. We’re already one foot over the cliff. The status quo is certain death, so we have to act, but act wisely.
Q3: What does “acting wisely” look like in practice? What safeguards are you proposing?
One key principle is scaling out rather than scaling up. Imagine ten farms of 100 hectares, spaced 100 kilometres apart, versus one farm of 1,000 hectares. The number of cattle is the same, but the impact on the land is completely different — it’s like the difference between putting all your weight on your toe versus lying down. Distributed, community-managed pilots cause far less ecological disruption than concentrated industrial operations.
That’s why coastal communities have to be at the centre of this as stewards, and not just as recipients of compensation. When a big company buys carbon credits, the financial logic rarely makes sense for the communities involved. We’re not interested in a finance play. We want communities to be genuinely incentivised to protect their ocean. That means they need to own a real stake in what happens there.
We want the workshop to be the first step towards creating a clear requirements baseline: a checklist of social safeguards, ecological standards, and consent processes that any mCDR project in Africa should meet. Investors would fund to this standard, and developers would design to meet it.
Q4: Who’s going to participate in the workshop, and what do you hope comes out of it?
We’re bringing together marine scientists, coastal community representatives, African policy leads, civil society organisations, and private and philanthropic investors. We want mCDR developers and carbon credit buyers in the room too, because the system only changes if industry is part of building it.
The conversation builds on work already started by Ocean Visions (who CarbonFix also fund) and Kinjani, and we’re fully aligned on the goal: a decent, reasonable framework so that Africa can seize the opportunity of mCDR — to help fix the climate, and potentially create economic benefit as a bonus, not as the primary motive.
From the workshop, we want to take the outputs to the Our Ocean Conference in June in Mombasa, Kenya, and ultimately to the Blue pre-COP in Australia and some Pacific islands in October and the Climate COP in Turkey.
Out of 36 countries most affected by climate change, 33 are in Africa. The continent has contributed less than 4% of global emissions. Africa deserves to contribute shaping the rules of this space — not just comply with them.
