Niue Ocean Wide Trust

The Blue Pacific, 30 million square kilometres of ocean, is one of the world’s healthiest marine ecosystems, supplying half the world’s tuna. Yet funding to provide long-term protection of these waters is an ongoing struggle.

The region faces dual pressures: localised threats such as illegal fishing and overexploitation, alongside systemic vulnerabilities to climate change, including rising sea levels and ocean acidification.

Niue’s marine territory is 1,200 times the size of its landmass, costly to manage with the limited, short-term financing that is typically available to island nations.

Growing climate impacts make sustained monitoring, enforcement and stewardship increasingly urgent, yet grant-by-grant funding cannot guarantee this work continues for the decades it requires.

Niue Ocean Wide Trust was founded by Niuean siblings Coral and Brendon Pasisi and local colleague Dr Josie Tamate, working with communities, government and partners to fund marine protection permanently, rather than relying on the next grant.

Its solution is Ocean Conservation Commitments (OCCs), a financing model based on the real cost of stewardship rather than debt or offsets. It calculates the real annual cost of protecting and managing Niue’s ocean and converts that into an annual NZ$250 contribution per square kilometre over a 20-year period sold to individuals, companies, governments and philanthropies.

Around 40,000 OCCs have been sponsored by more than 800 stakeholders worldwide, building towards the NZ$32 million endowment that will fund the Trust.

All 327,000 square kilometres of Niue’s ocean territory, an area the size of Vietnam, is now under full sustainable management as the Niue Nukutuluea Multipurpose Marine Park, with 40% protected as the Niue Moana Mahu no-take area, where no fishing or extractive activity is permitted.

The results are measurable: a 2023 survey found fish biomass up 60%, top predators up 45% and coral cover up 10% since 2016. Each of Niue’s 14 villages now has its own resource management plan and advisory committee, funded for 20 years.

The Trust also invests in people: around half of senior high school students have received ocean-safety training, some undertaking PADI certification, alongside new tertiary scholarships and the country’s first nationwide cyclone insurance.

Niue Ocean Wide Trust is helping the world reach a positive tipping point, a threshold beyond which change becomes self-sustaining. Its model gives Pacific and small island developing states a blueprint to fund protection of their own waters, supporting a global target of 25-30% of the world’s Exclusive Economic Zones under integrated management by 2030.