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FUNDERS FORUM
2026 EDITION 2

cyprus eu council presidency

The ocean is both origin and engine, sustaining life, shaping climate, and supporting economies, yet its future depends on whether we can recognise its value not only in principle, but in how we act, invest, and lead.

On May 12th we are convening the next Forum under the formal mandate of the EU Council Presidency, focused on maritime decarbonisation, port and seascape resilience, and science-based innovation.

The short version is that we are trying to look at the maritime transition as a seascape system, where ocean health and capital design are treated as part of the same challenge, and where the aim is to build the conditions under which transition can happen safely and at scale.

The Funders Forum is a platform for learning, orchestration and capital design, shaping new pathways for planetary stability with the ocean as a central driver.

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Some of the most consequential decisions for ocean health, biodiversity and climate are made in port - seascapes. This is where we work on making them better.

EXPERIENCE

Ports are not simply infrastructure. They are the places where maritime transport, energy systems, offshore development, industrial activity, coastal communities and marine ecosystems are brought into direct operational relationship with one another — and where decarbonisation, ocean health and long-term prosperity are being tested against each other in practice, every day.

The challenge is not a shortage of ambition or capital. It is that the actors whose decisions already shape these outcomes have never been designed to act in concert. Demand is fragmented. Validation pathways are weak. Promising innovations stall between research and deployment. Different forms of capital operate according to different logics, on different timelines, with no shared architecture to connect them. The result is a system that is individually rational and collectively inadequate.

The Funders Forum convenes a growing network of senior leaders from philanthropy, long-term capital, industry, science and public institutions to work on that architecture. Not through presentations or panels, but through a focused, off-record dialogue and intelligence co-creation designed to produce something concrete: a shared understanding of where coordination, scale and impact breaks down, and a first working outline of how it could be rebuilt.

This second 2026 edition, held under the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the European Union, builds directly on the first 2026 edition convened at EU Ocean Days in Brussels — advancing a line of work on decarbonising maritime transport, ports and offshore energy into sharper focus and a concrete designed output. It centres on the port seascape as a system, and on the coalition logic required to make it function as one.

The envisioned output is a stencil for a port seascape coalition: a practical design for connecting decarbonisation, ocean observation, and water, biodiversity and coastal resilience through shared actors, sequenced capital and the kind of governance that holds across institutional boundaries.

The Funders Forum is a platform for learning, orchestration and capital design. What begins in Cyprus could become the architecture for something that outlasts the room.

OUTCOMES

Learning

A rigorous shared diagnosis of where fragmentation limits progress across port seascapes, and what conditions, if changed, would alter the system.

Coalition architecture

A first working stencil defining the actors, functions, capital roles and governance logic required for a port seascape coalition to become operational.

Capital design

A view of how different forms of capital can be sequenced and combined across the system, and where innovative structures, portfolio approaches and catalytic interventions can open pathways that no single actor or institution can create alone.

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