Ocean Innovation Africa - Responsible mCDR Finance & Safeguards
CarbonFix cohort
Type
Founders
Type of intervention
About this project
We sponsored Responsible mCDR Finance & Safeguards, one of six concurrent workshops at the annual Ocean Innovation Africa conference in March 2026.
The aim of the workshop is to define the requirements and architecture for an marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) system that prioritizes people and nature. Africa can be too easily bought by investors sometimes, and communities have often received short-term compensation for projects that result in harm to the community or the environment.
“We want to stop the trend of trading health for wealth,” says Alexis Grosskopf, founder and CEO of Ocean Innovation Africa (OIA). “We hope that the workshop participants can help to create a list of ecological safeguards and the social license that projects need to have.”
Ocean Innovation Africa is a platform founded in 2019 to inspire sustainable and equitable ocean solutions, attract private-sector investment, and catalyse meaningful partnerships across the continent.
OIA join our ocean portfolio along with Ocean Visions: we funded their annual summit in 2025 and their ocean hubs across the Global South in the same year. Much like OIA, these hubs aim to accelerate international collaboration on potentially crucial but unexplored solution pathways, including mCDR and the repair of oceanic ecosystems.
Founder Q & A
Q: 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.
Read the full Q&A here.