Companies Hoard Trove of Ocean Data
The private sector is lagging public entities on transparency, with investors urged to push for greater access.
Despite an increase in regulations mandating corporate disclosures of sustainability-related risks, investors have a far from complete picture of the depth of their portfolio holdings’ negative impacts on the ocean.
According to Kimberly Mathisen, CEO of non-profit HUB Ocean, private sector companies in particular are not making enough of their ocean biodiversity data publicly available.
HUB Ocean recently published a report assessing the public-private sector split in ocean biodiversity data contributions to the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
It found that just 3% of global ocean biodiversity data assembled in the public biodiversity repositories comes from the private sector – despite the fact there are many more companies which collect ocean-related data to inform commercial operations, it said.
“With decades of industrialisation in some parts of the ocean, we know there is better data that remains locked inside company boundaries – we need it to flow into the open space,” said Mathisen.
Mandatory sustainability-related disclosures like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive have been instrumental in companies starting to share information, she noted.
“But these data sets are incomplete,” Mathisen said. By complying with regulation, companies are not necessarily sharing everything they know.
“They are using new technologies all the time, like sensors in the water, and are collecting a lot more data which investors need to fully understand their [exposure to ocean-related risks],” she said.
An investor invested in shipping companies may want to understand the percentage of time its vessels are spending in areas of the ocean which house vulnerable marine life, for example.
“This is the kind of data that hasn’t been to hand,” she said.
Murky depths
The report noted sector disparities in public data sharing among private sector companies.
Ocean-related industries, such as offshore oil and gas, renewable energy, and fishing and shipping companies contributed 52% of available private sector ocean data, followed by consulting companies (29%) and other for-profit ocean organisations (19%) involved in travel, tourism and leisure. Offshore wind firms remained largely absent from data-sharing efforts, it added.
At the regional level, private sector ocean data contributions in some countries – including Portugal and Japan – stood as high as 30-50%, yet the private sector only accounted for 0.1% of total ocean data contributions from Australia.
Countries can take transformative action such as that already seen in Norway, HUB Ocean suggested. Its government has mandated oil and gas operators to share environmental data, which is aggregated and made publicly available by international accredited registrar and classification society DNV.
As a result, Norway contributes 54% of all shared from industry, followed by the US (4%), Canada third with 1.8 % and the UK fourth (1.5%)
Despite this increased visibility, Norway has greenlit commercial-scale plans for deep-sea mining in national waters.
The report suggested that all governments should require data sharing as a mandatory step of the permitting processes for offshore operations, as is the case already in the UK.
Clearer waters
Earlier this year, a group of investors published a statement calling for better ocean-related data and tools on performance indicators, supply chains, local contexts, and sector estimates to support investment decisions.
“Understanding why specific data is needed [by investors] is important,” said François Mosnier, Head of the Ocean Programme at think tank Planet Tracker, noting that large publicly-listed firms needed to source and share information from smaller firms in their supply chain which might be privately-owned and less subject to regulation.
“Across many ocean supply chains, private companies might hold a prominent position. Because data needs to ‘travel’ throughout the supply chain to be useable by downstream companies, it is important that all stages of the supply chain disclose relevant information, no matter their ownership structure.”
Failure by a privately-owned feed supplier to disclose might prevent a large, listed aquaculture firm from disclosing the origin of its feed, which would expose investors to possible deforestation or overfishing risks, he noted.
Challenges preventing companies from publicly sharing ocean data include fear of liabilities and losing a competitive edge, the HUB Ocean report said. In addition, companies can find it difficult to discern appropriate ways to share their data, due to a proliferation of standards and frameworks.
“Ocean data disclosure can be quite daunting, as ‘ocean’ can mean anything from shipping to fishing to offshore oil and gas – but it does not need to be,” said Mosnier.
The report recommended companies appoint an in-house ocean data steward to ensure accountability, efficiency and desired outcomes, and to scale data sharing, starting with straightforward use cases and observations from specific locations.
“Investors want more data on oceans, as much of it remains not fit for purpose,” Mathisen said.
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