Sustainability in Your Ear Transcript: Accelerating Ocean Solutions With Okhtapus Cofounder Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:09

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Today we are going to be speaking about oceans. The ocean produces half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions—and gets more acidic as it does—as well as regulates the entire planet's climate. It's also projected to become the home of a $3.2 trillion blue economy by 2030. Yet by nearly every measure, ocean health is declining. Coral reefs are bleaching. Coastal communities face rising seas, and marine ecosystems are approaching irreversible tipping points.

Here's the paradox. We also have proven solutions to many of these problems—innovations in coastal resilience, coral restoration, sustainable aquaculture, and marine pollution prevention—but 70% of these solutions never get out of the pilot phase. They win awards, they generate great press, and then they stall, trapped by broken financing and project development systems that can't connect working innovations with the cities, ports, and coastal regions that desperately need them, along with the investors and funders that want to make it happen.

Our guest today, Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, is co-founder and ocean lead for Okhtapus—that's O-K-H-T-A-P-U-S—an ocean restoration program that has built an AI-powered global replication platform to connect proven ocean and coastal climate solutions with those cities, ports, and infrastructure owners who want to deploy them, and the investors who can fund it.

I met Stewart at the New Day impact investing event that Earth911 live-streamed during Climate Week in October. That was only a year after Okhtapus was founded. Stewart has spent two decades working at the intersection of climate resilience, indigenous economic sovereignty, and ocean policy, and he's built a platform to solve this specific bottleneck—that funding and idea sharing that we need.

Stewart previously served on President Obama's Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, led policy and investments at the Resilient Cities Network, and now serves as Managing Director of the World Ocean Council, in addition to his role at Okhtapus. The World Ocean Council is an international alliance focused on corporate ocean responsibility. And through his consulting firm, Precovery Labs, Stewart's worked with everyone from the Ocean Conservancy to the NDN Collective, as he pioneered the concept of "precovery"—building resilience before disaster strikes, rather than just recovering afterwards.

Okhtapus isn't just another accelerator, incubator, or pitch competition. They're building what they call replicators—systems that take what already works in one location and deploy it in dozens or hundreds of others, from mangrove restoration to urban cooling systems, from circular waste solutions to sustainable shipping innovations. Okhtapus seeks to scale interventions, as they put it, from "reef to roof." And the timing matters. Despite the potential of the blue economy, despite the urgency of climate stresses, there's a massive funding gap for ocean health initiatives. Investors can't find validated deal flow, and cities don't know which solutions actually work, so innovators with proven track records can't access the capital or partnerships they need to scale.

Meanwhile, 40% of the world's population lives on coastlines that are increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts, with indigenous and frontline communities bearing the heaviest burden.

We'll talk with Stewart about why so many ocean and other climate innovations die at the pilot phase, how AI can accelerate the matchmaking of solutions and sites, and what he's learned from his work with indigenous communities about resilience and sovereignty, and what's actually launching in 2026 when the first Okhtapus Global Replicator will go live.

You can learn more about Okhtapus at okhtapus.org again, that's spelled O-K-H-T-A-P-U-S, okhtapus.org. So can we turn the oceans crisis into a blueprint for planetary regeneration? Let's find out right after a brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Stewart. How are you doing today?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  4:36

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:39

Well, thank you for joining me. It was great to meet you and talk at Climate Week, and I wanted to dig into this with you. You're two years into creating Okhtapus, and you decided at Climate Week in 2023—you shook hands with your co-founder and said, "Let's go build something for the ocean and for people." So what were the frustrations that led to that handshake, and why did you feel the existing systems weren't working?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  4:59

Yeah, that's funny, because it really was frustration in some ways. And at that point, running around for Climate Week, knowing the worlds that we had worked in, and also a growing sense of fascination and urgency with water, with ocean, sort of the whole of water, and where we're headed with it, which is not always great news.

And then the two of us saying, "Okay, we call it the September Agreement"—is what we call that—if you know, an Iranian woman and an American man can put a handshake together and say, "We're going to go build something and do it because we feel this sense of urgency, and we feel this frustration with the speed and the efficiency of solving problems that are combined." Because we met almost 10 years ago, our combined knowledge and networks and skills and ability, and all the people around us who are even smarter about some of these issues and areas and things that we're tackling—we should be able to do something like this.

And in some ways, it was a conversation that had started earlier than that, but then with one witness in hand, we shook hands at a cafe and said, "Let's try to go do this thing." And then it was some months later, we said, "We're going to go do this. We're going to actually build something that has this vision," even as hard as it feels sometimes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:32

So what is the vision? Break it down for us.

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  6:35

We felt, and the frustration comes from that, despite really good work, we still had funders and innovators of varying types and project enablers—all three of them—kind of pointing fingers at each other, saying, "I can't find this. I don't get this. I can't find this. I can't get the money."

And we, having been especially in sort of the funding and financing space of NGOs, knowing that they do really good work—we shouldn't take away from any of that—but that project-by-project and sort of slower pace, as well as for innovators, this valley of death that startups and scale-ups run into, we knew that there should be a way that all three of them, what we now call "the three hearts of the octopus"—because they have three hearts—should be able to triangulate faster and more efficiently.

And that's basically what we did. We went and built an AI-enabled platform—call it a global replication platform from reef to roof—that allows that connectivity to happen and the vetting and matching to happen. So the vision is, and it is a little bit of a system user and a system breaker at the same time, and that's where some of the difficulty comes with it. Because we hear lots of people say, "Oh my gosh, this is so needed. Good luck. Good luck trying to change that system with each of those three parties and the ecosystem around them," because it's obviously not just innovators, enablers, and funders, as we describe them, the three hearts of the octopus. It's also other entities, systems, policy, planning in and around that, that also have to kind of move in the same direction.

But our vision was, let's get the three moving, enabled, replicating faster and more efficiently. So eventually, like a 10-year goal—sort of tongue-in-cheek, but also very true—10 years from now, if funders and investors say, "Look, we're good enough, right? You've done enough of the value creation between the innovators and enablers. We get it. We've got projects. We've got projects at enough scale and size," because often the ticket price is too small for some investors. 10 years from now, that would be the dream, right? That that triangulation and that AI-enabled platform, along with the human elements, reach a point where, wow, we really have replicability and can take that to the world, and there's enough to do instead of the finger-pointing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:07

So what's the scope of the problem? How many viable solutions are stuck, and what's the economic and environmental cost of the bottleneck that you're trying to solve?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  9:16

So there's economic and environmental cost, because we're doing recovery while we're doing precovery. So part of this is that we have to do better as we move forward with whatever we're building, doing, seeking to find solutions for—but we've also done enough damage that we also have a baseline we have to figure out to start and work backwards to, right?

So generally speaking, having taught entrepreneurship as for as long as I have and worked with startups, now that I'm a startup, it's a very familiar feeling to sort of reach a certain point and not be able to find the next funder, or to run into policy and planning roadblocks for procurement, for instance, from a particular city or a port or a corporation. So there are very tough hurdles for all of the players doing this work, but we've also put some impediments in the way that we didn't need to.

And part of that comes from—and we're not going to tackle this—but there is a whole policy element to this. And so we need those people who are doing that kind of global to regional to national to local policy change, for sure. All of that is around the ecosystem that our three hearts operate in, right?

But what we're saying is, if we find a way to do replication that says a well-established late-stage startup or scale-up or SME is already working effectively enough, but they need to advance—not just one to one, but like one to three to five more places with more solutions at more times—and funders can see that it pencils financially, but it also increases the level of impact. So what we're trying to do is kind of value leaping and building a bridge over the valley of death for startups and scale-ups and SMEs, but also for those project owners at a city, a corporation, or otherwise, right, whether they're looking for money or they have their own money.

So there's a triangulation, literally around those three hearts of the octopus, to move that process forward. The system that is in place now tends to have money follow certain patterns.

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:37

It's a herd thing. Once somebody puts money in, somebody else says, "That's safe," and then somebody else sees and they go, "That must be safe," and so forth. And then we get a lot of money on one and not necessarily the right solution. How do you change that?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  11:51

Well, and I think part of it is you've got to have storytelling. So Okhtapus does have a nonprofit entity that we've just incorporated, and we're going to advance on called O Lab, in order to do some of the ecosystem work that the for-profit Okhtapus is not going to do.

And part of that is because storytelling and education and training have to happen kind of simultaneous to bringing along all these other individuals, whether they're a venture capital funder or somebody that's working on blue bonds. And this gets back to some of our former work, and also work that other people are doing sort of every day in their job. And that's, what are the measures? What's the impact? How do we do KPIs? What are the tools? How do you say this is a project that's made more resilient or has a precovery mindset, rather than just like, "Hey, we're going to build this wall," or "We're going to build this building"?

So part of it is good storytelling that explains where we are. It's also getting funding to the right places, because I think you probably know adaptation funding and financing globally is way too small, and we're over tipping points, right? So we're going into the recovery even though we talk about precovery, right, or resilience building. So we've got to do sort of double duty, because there's no ignoring the fact that we've got to do adaptation, because the water's at our doorstep, literally and figuratively.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:17

Can you unpack the idea of precovery a little bit? How do you identify a precovery opportunity?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  13:24

So in part, by the definition, everything is a precovery opportunity. So the sense of precovery—and this gets to some of the accounting that's being done around nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, resilience, return on resilience value—so that if somebody really had a precovery mindset, they would say, "Look, let's figure out what the problems are in 30 years if we do this status quo, and then work backwards from that and build in these various measures."

And some of it might be that precovery turns into recovery because we're trying to do habitat regeneration while we do new buildings, or while we do new seashore or coastal resilience kinds of infrastructure, right? So what's the difference, monetarily, of costs saved, lives saved, insurance payments, etc., etc., if we put the precovery lens on there, right? If that mindset is used every single time.

So unlike some of the sort of optional things you might find in a piece of policy that says you've got to do this if you build Y, this is more like if you build Y and you build Z and X, here's the frame. Figure out what those costs saved, costs avoided, and what I would call "return on resilience value" for this precovery mindset are done right from scratch.

And you can imagine from a mindset standpoint, this is really hard for people to get around, because we're looking to cut costs in every deal, right? So cost-effectiveness becomes oddly misshapen when you start to say, "Yeah, well, actually, a little bit more money on a five-foot basement than a three-foot basement, or siting this, or materials," or whatever it might be, right, as you kind of run through the list—feels more expensive, but is not in the long run.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:29

In addition to the investors who want to make money providing a resilient economy, particularly a blue economy, sounds to me like insurance companies would be a vast source of funding in order to lower their future liability. Is that a trend that is really taking hold?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  15:46

You know, it's increasing. When I was in my former role, we had amazing partnerships and funding from Hudson Insurance, the Zurich Foundation, and there are other insurance companies that are in the play.

I think the real difference is, and we just heard this a few weeks ago during BlueFin, the Blue Finance Summit, insurance playing a greater role than the normal role of insurance is what's different, because now they're putting philanthropic and financing dollars into projects, because that adaptation money is so low. And it's even lower when you start talking ocean and coastal, right?

So part of the margin that we're trying to overcome is that it's behind the eight ball when it comes to adaptation funding. It's even tinier on the ocean side. And so an insurance company who's looking at parametric or parametric bonds, or whatever it might be—some parametric bonds were issued by Jamaica, and thank God some of those were there, because the level of devastation in Jamaica is way worse than was predicted, right?

So insurance has a massive, massive role—politically, policy-wise, from the products they create, including some of those parametric products—but also newly so in the philanthropic and investor space, to say, "We believe in this," to do the deals. And so they're starting to be this conversation. It needs to increase. And I think there's some places where you're really seeing that emphasis, and that's fantastic to see, because the combination actually can get a deal done.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:36

Actually think about the multi-trillion-dollar blue economy that we're talking about beginning to build here, one predicated on resilient strategy. The question comes up, how do we avoid doing to nature what we did on dry land as we expand that ocean economy? What's your best advice?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  17:57

Well, and I think that's a little bit of where the precovery mindset is even more important, because this is, in some places, completely nascent activity. I think, without question, there are lessons from mountaintop removal and what it did right there on-site, as well as downstream, from tailings, from debris, etc., that are completely applicable in the water and ocean space—made more difficult because we don't actually live there.

And this has been part of the problem of the global commons of the ocean—is that people think it's completely open to whatever we throw at it. And that has become clear in the last years, and especially like in the last year, where the data gets better, the reports get more dire because of warming, acidification, current changes, etc., coral loss, bleaching, fisheries problems.

So I would say we didn't learn the lesson in a lot of ways, because we kept at it to such extent that we nearly tipped over already this 70% of the planet, right? This isn't Planet Earth. This is Planet Water, and that water provides a very distinct function for the hydrological cycle.

So we have to be super careful at a very, very local level when it comes to local fisheries, water pollution, stuff that has nothing to do with climate change, frankly, right, in our old mindset. You have to really consider climate change as one stress, an overarching one, and one that's creating massive cascading effects—but it is still one of many that we did to the planet. There are lots of dire situations that are not directly—and maybe only indirectly—related to climate change: wastewater, pollution, etc., right, ag runoff, these algae blooms, etc., etc.

So yes, greenhouse gas reduction, mitigation efforts. But even if that were not happening, we've done things to the planet, to the natural ecosystem, that's really affecting human health now.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:27

Now you bill yourself as closing the scaling gap, and you're using AI to do it. What you just laid out is a massive systems problem where we don't always understand what one intervention will do in another part of the system—that's our biggest challenge. How are you using this AI to enable the matchmaking to really both proactively understand the potential impact, positive and unintended, while finding the right financial return?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  20:57

That's a great question. We have our own system and our CTO built out algorithms and bots to work on our database. So I would call it—and just to be clear, because there are some things to question about AI and its use, and its power use and water use and the giant server fields—this is essentially desktop AI, right? This is something that, okay, once up and spinning and running, it's taking our portfolios and doing the vetting and matching and scraping that bring them together just like you and I would if we were AI, and we're able to do that at its speed, right?

So part of the way that we make sure that it's the right kind of matching is that we've been very clear that we're not an incubator, we're not an accelerator—we're late-stage startup to scale-up to SME. And because of that, there's a kind of Goldilocks zone for us. That's that stage of company, and then projects that are of a certain size and shovel-readiness, or we help them with that shovel-readiness, so that when they meet, and they're vetted eventually by the AI, because it's churning already, right, and we have a set of KPIs that they're sort of comparing themselves against—then you are making sure that at least they've done this somewhere else multiple times, and you've got projects that are ready for them.

And for us, replication—also, it's an aggregation, which is something that is definitely not a super common activity right now. If we have three solutions that are well-vetted, well-placed, success-rate, and all three of them can go to a project at the same time, but also multiple projects—say it was a set of island nations or whatever it was, right—then we're spinning that up so that an investor, whether it's self-funded or it's an investor that's coming in with a bond or whatever, guarantee or large loan from a development bank, whatever it might be, right, depending on the size and scale, you're combining those at the same time.

And because we go reef to roof, we might actually find that two or three of the things that we've been talking about then are also not siloed in just the ocean or not siloed just on land or in urban resilience contexts, and that helps create this kind of Goldilocks zone. And we know there's enough money to be made, used, and multiplied in that zone, and that's what innovators and enablers are both looking for at the same time.

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:24

Building on that, how do you replicate success in different socioeconomic and natural settings? That context changes the impact of the intervention that you're talking about. What's your methodology for assessing the replicability of a project?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  23:43

Yeah, absolutely. Because not everything is going to go one-to-one from—let's just say in the enabler list that we have: cities, ports, corporations, etc.—there will probably be, and we don't know this yet, there will probably be a hierarchy or prioritization that starts to take place of solution types and project types that are in that Goldilocks zone because of their replicability in multiple places, because it doesn't matter if it's the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean, or the Caribbean.

Great, right? From a city context, we have seen that potential happen with, say, bike share and bus and sort of riverine activities and other things that could be part of those projects. So there will be, still some human element B, vetting across contexts that make it more viable.

The other thing is that for us, because we both have this deep-seated experience with equity and making sure that the equity lens—there's another lens, right, the equity lens on places and local engagement and local demand—have to be there. Otherwise there's not going to be a fit that's appropriate. Then it's just another, you know—frankly, it's another sort of colonial style, like, "Hey, take this," right, or "Give us this."

And I think, you know, part of this is making sure that we just were having a conversation today about a potential idea for a certain part of the world. And we realized that making sure that the innovators were first pulled from that local area or basin is more important in some ways to push their local economic development process and policies forward than just grabbing something off the shelf.

So we're going to have to play with that. And you could imagine that over time, if it really starts churning, there will be—at least, this would be my hope—there will be sets of innovations that are sort of pan-global. There will be sets of innovations that are pan-tropical zone. There will be sets of innovations that are pan-cities of size X to Y. But again, that doesn't exist in the world yet, and that would only be if we got enough churn to kind of see that pattern emerge.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:01

And ultimately, at the end of the day, these interventions are not always going to be comfortable for everybody, but by finding where they can be adjusted appropriately in order to still be effective while fitting the context, is going to be the biggest challenge.

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  26:16

For sure. And you've surely heard many people say this in various forms, right? "If you've seen one city, you've seen one city. If you've seen one port, you've seen one port," etc., right?

But there is enough platform for replicating into places that have similar functions. So one of our clients does underwater installations that's connected to ROVs and AI and dashboards around these amazing biodiversity builders, right? And those can be attached to offshore wind—floating and fixed—to piers that are in the port, port cities offshore, could be oil rigs, even, that become reefs because of these interventions, right?

So it gets back a little bit to the policy where, like, if a country or the EU or California says every single fixed wind farm has to have this on the bottom in order to do the right kinds of biodiversity building, or in fact regenerative type of activity—and we've had a lot of debates about what regeneration means—but being able to get that in place really helps move that process along. And then you start to find like for like.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:32

A lot of folks think of their investments as isolated assets, and so would be confused by or feel imposed upon by that requirement you described, for instance, to build the reefing capability into an installation. There's so much to unpack here. I want to take a quick commercial break. We're going to be right back. Folks, stay tuned.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let's get back to the conversation with Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy. He is co-founder of Okhtapus, an ocean restoration program that has built an AI-powered global replication platform to connect proven ocean and coastal climate solutions to the places and funders that can get them going.

Stewart, your mission spans, as you've described, ocean restoration all the way to something like urban cooling. Can you share an example of projects that span that entire range? What do you think about when you think about, for instance, the impact of HVAC emissions on ocean acidity?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  28:32

Yes, and that takes some holistic thinking, which is helpful when you've sort of come out of the resilience space, because you're looking at combinations of shocks and stresses and how they're interconnected, both in terms of what they do in an immediate location, versus somewhere down river—sometimes right, literally into the ocean—or through the air, or through whatever systems it might be that it's affecting.

So for us, especially with the idea that there are things we can do on land—whether it's pesticides, ag runoff, PFAs, plastics, microplastics, air quality. I mean, one of the ironies of some of the places we work is that you've got people who work in areas like, say, next to a port, and that port, because it's still using fossil fuel-powered vehicles, they're running engines because there's no shore power, etc.

You can do things on land that really include a blue economy lens or a lens that looks at, say, a port infrastructure electrification that you could tie to sort of asthma rates for children who live in that neighborhood who's next to the port, right? So this is the sort of thinking that—in some ways it's tough from a funder standpoint, because we often hear, "Well, that's not what we fund." Yeah, but if you do X, Y will happen.

This gets back to that, a little bit of that mindset kind of thinking. Where can you monetize the change in effect, directly and indirectly? And part of that comes from being able to very holistically look at how a city runs.

Could be changing how we heat or cool, but it could also be that part of the heat aspect—and this gets to some of the work and innovation that people are doing in cities right now as these heat emergencies continue to increase—is there a nature-based solution that helps you? We call them trees, right? But are there other things that you can do that are a kind of reduction in pavement, or whatever it might be, right?

There's solutions that we've seen that also then have a follow-on effect for the very thing that has started the issues with the heat in the first place. So there is a little bit of give and take.

I think one difference, and I think we have to remember this, right, is there's lots of places that are being affected by whether it's sea level rise or heat or some of these other aspects, and they're not the places that have produced the problem, right? Countries that were not the industrial or extractive countries that, in fact, are now bearing the brunt on a small island state in the middle of the Pacific where sea rise, plastics come to them, and there's literally nothing they can do about the actual mitigation side of it, very little—although they could electrify their ports, and a lot of them are looking at those kinds of activities.

But those big questions then become part of that holistic view of what can we do in the places that we're working.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:33

And what you're describing is addressing the externalities which we have traditionally ignored as an economy, which must be a difficult conversation to say, "By the way, all these inconvenient truths that you don't want to pay attention to are an outcome of your work." How does that, particularly with ports, which are very conservative, play to the leadership?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  31:57

Yeah, I think it's changing. Ironically, some of the shipping lines and the discussions at IMO, at the International Maritime Organization, were pretty progressive, except for certain countries that bogged down the negotiations three or four weeks ago—one country in particular, and no prizes for guesses on that one.

But shipping lines and ports realize that there is an economic value to doing things in a different way. It is not just a change in what we're trying to do for, say, something that feels like it's climate change or greenhouse gas reduction, right? And I think there is a growing movement.

We're very lucky to have a relationship with a few different ports and cities, and there are some amazing cities that are way ahead on this. I'm sitting right now in Barcelona, where we have a very close relationship with the port and the city. And the port and the city really banded together to have a whole blue economy strategy that came from the city council and down. And the port has made an aggressive stance on innovation that leads to a different way of functioning as a business, including, in fact, one of those clients who's putting their life-boosting units in the water, right in the port property.

Which, if you think about it, starts to give them data on everything from biomass and biodiversity increases to nitrogen reduction, etc., that then are part of their own potential biodiversity and climate credits, and any customers that they have that can be a part of that.

So there is movement. And even in those traditional spaces, there's an awareness. Because the other thing that's a very sort of return-on-resilience-value view of this is, if you do that, do you also then help fisheries? Do you help ecotourism, etc., etc., right?

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:56

Well, and then we begin to map those relationships in a way we haven't in the past, which opens new economic vistas, as well as helps us more deeply understand the consequences of our interaction with nature.

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  34:11

Absolutely. And I think we at Okhtapus—who are part of a group that got together in early 2024, just about when we were incorporating—and the Center for Sea Rise Solutions and the World Ocean Council and Italy, the City Global City Network, and others. AI VP came together with the city and the port of Barcelona.

We had what we call the Blue Glue initiative, and "blue glue" meaning using that blue connectivity of water and ocean to bring together cities, ports, corporations, academia, talking about everything from, you know, pre-K to later-stage education, workforce development, retraining that embraced all of those different partners and the work that they were trying to do together.

So, yeah, I think part of this is just—it is unusual partners sometimes, and getting people comfortable with that, and unusual ideas that start to sound like, "Wait, that's three or four pillars at the same time." Well, yes, it is, right.

We as humans find it difficult to do that precovery stuff, whether it's insurance or a will or anything else, right? Like, that inevitability seems to fail us until there's a disaster. And I mean, having worked on two disasters—the Hurricane Task Force for Hurricane Sandy, but also post-Katrina—every time something like that happens, people say, "Oh, yeah, we should have done X," or, "Wow, we didn't change that since. Why?"

And that's unfortunate. We learn by mistakes, but not really, right? As I think Mark Twain said, you know, history doesn't just repeat, it rhymes—or some quote like that, right? It's very uncanny what you see from time to time, disaster to disaster.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:57

We do have some persistent shortcomings. Now you're launching the first Okhtapus Global Replicator in 2026. What is that actually going to look like on the ground?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  36:09

So part of what we've done is to say, not only can we have the platform, which is the Global Replicator Platform itself, with portfolios starting to vet and match and scraping data that starts to inform that further, we realized that we could also sort of turn it upside down and say we want to bring a set of replicable, already functioning, late-stage startups or scale-ups to a particular problem or places at the same time, so that we're almost creating a cohort of innovators that work on a problem in a place or multiple places.

So that not only are they sort of tackling a problem or a place from a few different angles as innovators—that place, the project owner, what we call enablers, is starting to get almost economic development play off of bringing them to work on these solutions, right?

So it's both turning the model a little bit. We're like, we're bringing the replicator to a place, into a problem, or a set of problems, right? We have a really interesting concept out right now with a large NGO focused on coral reefs, but not on the reef part of it—about other factors—and bringing innovators to solve problems that actually work inland and in an overarching way.

So if funded, the idea would be that we would start to host and create a series of these replicator cohorts.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:42

I envision, as you say, a “Strike Force Okhtapus,” has entrepreneurs and scientists parachuting in. Are you going to have a presence on the ground in those locations, or is this a distributed effort that acts on that?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  37:57

So depending on the funding, what we've designed with some of our partners at this point is a year-long process where the innovators are together—and together with us—in place three times a year. Okay, so it's mostly virtual, but the idea would be that, especially if it's a singular place—say we pick a city or a port or a basin, as we call it, like a basin-based work, right—and we're working on lifting the prioritized projects that the enablers want to work on.

And we cut them off at a certain point and say, "Okay, we're only going to work on these five, but we're going to call innovators in to work on these five, and they're going to come from these various sectors." And that set of innovators, that cohort, is going to sort of run through that system and be in place.

So you can imagine that for some of them, say, our partners here in Barcelona, if they came to work on specific projects, and they also said, "I could use an EU office headquarters. I'm going to stay around because I really like the work and the system that's here supporting this work."

Imagine that, though, for a set of islands in the Caribbean, some coastal cities in Africa, right? Like versions of it that are both geographically differentiated, but also thematically or sectorally differentiated. So strike force, yes—but experienced strike force, not ideas.

Mitch Ratcliffe  39:21

The right team for the problem in the context of the place that's sourced globally, rather than limited to the resources that are locally available.

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  39:28

Yep.

Mitch Ratcliffe  39:29

So what metrics do you consider when you assess a solution is replication-ready?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  39:37

Like I said, they have to be past idea and early-startup stage. We haven't drawn a hard line like "past Series A"—we haven't done a hard line like that yet, because there are some that have bootstrapped or gotten amazing government grants, and they're actually selling and have great pilots and are proven that we could still take.

But they have to have a threshold of placement success, and have that connectivity where we don't see them just going to one place for one time. We see them going to multiple places at multiple times, potentially with other solutions. That looks different from a city to a port to a corporation or a resort, or whatever it might be—could be even a social enterprise of some kind, or an NGO that has property and is going to do a bunch of work. That will look different across them, because of procurement, because of other reasons.

But the idea then is they are not early stage. We want our partners and people we work with who are accelerators working with the early-stage entities. We want them to be the next round. And actually, it's a little bit of a gap we're filling. It's the white space, because replication and aggregation of those that are further along is still a pretty open and untapped area, right?

So we want to be sure that we're able to sort of—that's the flywheel, if you will. Or the triangulation of the three hearts is right there, because then that really launches funders' views into something like, "Oh, so you're going to bring these three solutions to four ports and four to five different islands. I'm in." Right?

Again, half-jokingly, but half in truth—10 years from now, if this is done fast enough and ready enough, we should have a bulk of the combination of that pushing harder on the funders and on the system to get it right now.

What we don't know, of course, because some of these tipping points are speeding up, is, will we get to the solution status and base fast enough for some of these things that the urgency feels like right now?

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:45

You're also describing a complex, multifaceted storytelling challenge. And you mentioned O Lab was an undertaking that you also are engaged in. A recent survey showed that 75% of young people are concerned about ocean health, but 47% think that it's still healthy. How does that knowledge gap—that more general knowledge gap represented by that youth population, but it's true of all of us—how does that knowledge gap affect your strategy as you think about taking Okhtapus to market and evangelizing the opportunity for an economically profitable solution to creating a blue economy that can be healthy?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  42:29

Yeah, I think this goes back to the idea that if the sustainability and the regenerative nature of whatever that blue economy is doesn't get factored in first, then you're probably going to have some do-no-harm issues, right, that you're trying to avoid.

So I think the gap is—the gap that's really important is to say—and it's amazing that this is even a question, but people still think there is not a problem with sewage and wastewater generally in our cities globally. Yeah. And in various places like islands, where there's tons of cesspools and septics, right, that are failing.

And there are better ways of doing sewage and wastewater management, both very technical ones who we know and have worked with, but also more nature-based ways of doing filtration and circularity.

So I think the gap—there's a little bit of a hard lesson on some of them. Like, you know, we were just talking about this today, because I still sit on the steering committee board of the <a href="https://www.oceansewagealliance.org">Ocean Sewage Alliance</a>. And it is amazing—it is just amazing—globally, when you get into conversations with people, that gap about whether it does harm to the ocean still or not, and inland lakes and rivers, is massive.

And there is an ongoing problem, and that problem contributes to the same sort of issues around species and biodiversity and habitat regeneration, because if you've still got those problems on land coming into the water, you're going to have problems with doing the regeneration right. And lots and lots of organizations find that out the hard way.

So we have to do better storytelling. And the one reason we have the storytelling, you know, sort of immersed in O Lab, even though we do—we'll do storytelling in case studies—is to be sure that the ecosystem that surrounds water and ocean doesn't seem so far away, because for most people, it seems so, in some cases, scary—the ocean—and far away, right? There be monsters, right? Release the kraken.

And unfortunately, the thing that's being released is microplastics, plastics, fibers, PFAs, etc., back onto us and into us, right—in our brains, in our bodies, in the clouds, in the water and soil.

So the kraken we've released is our own. And that's kind of how I think we've got to be able to tell the story—that when you don't do something just in your home, it can have a follow-on effect somewhere else.

Mitch Ratcliffe  45:12

So we are the kraken. And we're halfway through the UN Ocean Decade, which was, of course, instituted by the kraken. The UN Ocean Conference just wrapped in Nice. You mentioned that a few minutes ago. What do you think the most important initiatives that emerged from that gathering are, and what do you feel has to happen for us to succeed during the second half of this decade in reaching the goals of the Ocean Decade?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  45:39

I'll start with the positive—that shortly thereafter we reached the required signatures for the High Seas Treaty. Great. We have not reached the point we need to on the plastics treaty, but there was definitely a lot of conversation around that.

One of the things that our panels on ocean sewage—which I was wearing multiple hats in order to be able to have those conversations, including my role at Ocean Sewage Alliance—is not getting where it needs to, which contributes to other factors that are a problem, like acidification, which is a major problem with the ocean.

So getting—it kind of goes back to the storytelling. One of the things that we hope to do with Ocean Sewage Alliance is get a treaty in place around ocean sewage and wastewater. Because if you look at the SDGs, 14 is basically silent on ocean sewage and wastewater. 14, meaning "underwater," and 6 relates to it, but it's clean water and health-related.

So we've somehow got to get acidification—as mentioned specifically in SDG 14—something that we know absolutely how to take care of, with lots of new innovations but also, frankly, just good old-fashioned municipal dollars and infrastructure, is not being dealt with because we haven't said how we have to measure it.

So I think after UNOC, there were definitely some major funding pledges that were different, from everything from family offices and impact investing to country level. There needs to be more of that, because as I said, it's so small to begin with, that an incremental million or billion is nothing compared to the fact that we're so far behind and it's so small relative to other types of financing, right?

So I saw some real positives. I think I came away with kind of a skeptical realism that, you know, we didn't get there with some of it, and we still need to. And part of that is just educating the general public and policymakers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  47:49

Back to storytelling. Let me ask you this—a lot of our listeners would like to do something. What's one specific thing that they should look for or support in the blue economy that they could do today?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  48:05

I think some of the obvious ones that people already get involved with or put money into or donate things or do whatever, are sort of ocean cleanup types of activities. And I agree that—I've done them myself—I feel like those are still needed, because we do need to get stuff out of the system before it becomes even worse and breaks down even further, right?

The problem, though, is that—no pun intended—it's all upstream in terms of what needs to happen. So I think one of the things that, if you're donating money, look and see if whoever you're donating to is working on the front end of the problem or the back end—upstream or downstream.

If you're supporting a congressional candidate or an EU minister or whatever it is, or doing policy work yourself, and you're not linking ocean to, say, city urban resilience and coastal resilience—making those linkages for those people are really important. Upstream or downstream, because if you get upstream from packaging, plastics, PFAs, and policy, right, and it affects what then happens below, you're supporting something that isn't just on the back end of it, on the cleanup side, right?

So I think for people to get involved in that way—I would also say that if they're sort of in the arts, because that's a space—the equity and arts are a space that we try to include. I myself am a photographer. I use that as a medium. If you have that kind of ability, or you can support people who do that work, whether they're filmmakers or they're artists of any kind, getting that, especially with youth and children, right, is really important.

I mean, there are some amazing youth leaders working in blue economy and ocean issues. We had a few of them that I was with at the last couple of events. Follow those people and encourage them. Get involved on that. You know, look, if you're going to be on social media, do something with it. Really. Find a way to engage with those kinds of people who are really making change.

Mitch Ratcliffe  50:22

You've been very generous with your time, Stewart. Thank you. One last question. Can you paint a picture of what the world—the blue economy in 2035—will look like if you have gained the traction that you are aiming to?

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  50:39

2035. So if we're highly successful with the platform and the ecosystem around it, I would say that number and impact of solutions meeting projects, and them getting funded and done, is at that point where the funders say, "Okay, we got it. There's a lot. Okay, this is great," right? We've hit this kind of margin. We've hit a different type of tipping point, which is to say, we say uncle, because you really have brought so much to us that now we're not, like, looking for deals all the time, right?

So that's part of it—is the numbers there will tell a story. The numbers underneath them, though, I think are more significant, because if we've done that job correctly over a 10-year period, that means the actual KPIs—not just outputs, but outcomes—then are super measurable: biodiversity, regeneration, types of infrastructure.

Are we building differently? Are we building in other places? Are we building in a way that is with that precovery mindset, right? So I think there are ways we will be able to measure that.

I think also, if we're mostly effective, we also will have a set of data that will tell the story that will be important for going to the next phase, especially if we're still suffering from some of the same danger tipping points. If we can avoid—and another thing would be, for me, like, if we avoid some tipping points that we're right on the edge of, that's a big win. Whether it's currents, temperature, acidification, coral die-off—if we have some of that come back, fisheries—then we've done the right thing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  52:36

Well, Stewart, let's hope that happens, because I think moving from understanding to inspired innovation to create this blue economy is absolutely critical. And thank you so much for your time today.

Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy  52:48

That's great. Super pleasure.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe 52:55 Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy. He is co-founder and ocean lead at Okhtapus, a global platform that connects proven ocean and coastal climate solutions with the cities, ports, and investors who can drive deployment of effective projects. You can learn more about Stewart and the organization at okhtapus.org—and remember, Okhtapus is spelled O-K-H-T-A-P-U-S, okhtapus.org.

You know, it's worth noting that Okhtapus takes a very different approach from traditional Silicon Valley venture capital. And Stewart described how funders, innovators, and project enablers are often, as he put it, pointing fingers at each other while good solutions go unused. Perhaps instead of blaming each other, they should share risk information and look for ways to reduce that risk together—and across their entire portfolio, not on just a project-by-project basis.

As Stewart explained, climate tech isn't about growing as fast as possible… [We found the length limit for transcripts]

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