Everything is being repriced. Tariffs are weapons, rare earths are leverage, and no one quite agrees on who controls the shipping lanes anymore. But there is one asset that nobody seems to have gotten around to pricing properly. It is not semiconductors or lithium or gas. It is the ocean and more specifically, the living systems beneath its surface that quietly keep the planet running.
Start with Indonesia. Indonesia’s coral reefs cover an estimated 51,000 square kilometers or approximately 18% of the world’s total reef area and 51% of the region’s reefs. Its seagrasses and mangroves together hold around 3.4 billion tons of carbon which is five times more per unit area than tropical land-based forests and comprising 17% of the world’s blue carbon reservoir.
The country’s blue economy, the largest in Southeast Asia, is valued at $256 billion annually. These ecosystems regulate fisheries, stabilize coastlines, sequester carbon, and sustain the food security of hundreds of millions which the majority of whom live outside Indonesia’s borders.
What passes for compensation is inadequate. In August 2024, the United States and Indonesia signed a $35 million debt-for-nature swap, the first under the US Tropical Forest and Coral Reef Conservation Act dedicated exclusively to coral reefs.
Read More: UNESCO: Coral Reefs might go extinct
Including three earlier swaps in 2009, 2011, and 2014, the cumulative total stands at just under $105 million over fifteen years. Against the scale of the ecological service being rendered, the compensation is not simply inadequate.
The structural failure runs deeper than any single bilateral deal. Global climate finance hit a record $1.9 trillion in 2023, according to Climate Policy Initiative yet just 22% of bilateral climate finance targeted biodiversity co-benefits, leaving marine ecosystems, including the coral systems that anchor the Coral Triangle’s entire food web, effectively outside the financial architecture.
UNEP estimates developing countries need between $310–365 billion annually for climate adaptation through 2035; in 2023, developed nations provided just $26 billion. The gap is not marginal, but systemic.
Two additional failures compound the problem. First, blue carbon has no standardized accounting within the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions framework. Forest carbon anchors sovereign climate pledges: ocean carbon, which sequesters at rates that dwarf terrestrial forests per unit area, remains a footnote. This is not a scientific gap. It is
a political one. Second, analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development estimates that debt-for-nature swaps could unlock as much as $100 billion globally, yet the mechanism remains fragmented and deal by deal. There is no multilateral instrument that prices the ongoing stewardship of globally critical marine ecosystems at anything approaching market rate.
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Meanwhile, the asset is deteriorating. More than half of Indonesia’s protected coral areas are projected to face severe annual bleaching by 2044, which driven overwhelmingly by emissions from countries that have never contributed a dollar to protecting the reef. The costs of degradation are real, measurable, and global. The beneficiaries of conservation are diffuse, wealthy, and unaccountable.
The remedies are well within reach of the institutions that claim to govern the global commons. Multilateral development banks should price natural capital into sovereign credit assessments and countries stewarding critical ecosystems provide quantifiable global public goods, and their fiscal positions should reflect that.
The G20 should establish a standing Coral Triangle Conservation Compact, capitalized by beneficiary nations in proportion to the fisheries, climate stability, and biodiversity services they extract. And the UNFCCC must standardize blue carbon accounting under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, enabling marine ecosystems to generate tradeable credits on international markets. None of these proposals require new institutions. They require existing ones to do their jobs.
Indonesia’s ancestors crossed the ocean without instruments, navigating by stars and current and accumulated knowledge passed across generations. They understood the sea not as a common to be exploited, but as a system to be read, respected, and returned to in good condition. The current global financial system cannot claim the same.
Everything is being repriced. The ocean is still waiting for its turn.
Muhamad Rifki Maulana
Muhamad Rifki Maulana is an Economist at the Central Bank of Indonesia, where his work focuses on regional economic analysis, inflation dynamics, and green economy policy across Indonesia’s regions. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan, with a distinction in Sustainability. He can be reached at muhamad_rm@bi.go.id