Daniela Fernandez On Inspiring Youth Ecopreneurs To Transform Our Ocean
Daniela Fernandez is a visionary nonprofit leader and social entrepreneur, who has made it her life’s mission to restore the health of the ocean.
She founded Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) in her dorm room at Georgetown University when she was only 19 years old, after attending a United Nations meeting on climate change and realising she was the only young person in the room. Even then, Daniela knew political and business leaders were not moving fast enough to prevent disaster. Since 2014, she has catapulted SOA into the global spotlight – creating the world’s largest network of young ocean leaders, establishing a presence in 165 countries, and accelerating more than 270 solutions to heal, protect, and restore our ocean.
Daniela discusses how an entrepreneurial mindset can equip youth changemakers to make a positive impact and the intersection between technological innovation and saving our oceans.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit more about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise and saving the ocean?
[Daniela Fernandez] - What I always love to tell people is that I never set out to become a social entrepreneur or ecopreneur. Just to explain the terminology, we are now calling folks that are entrepreneurs working in the climate space to solve these crises ‘ecopreneurs’. I grew up in Ecuador, and I think that my love for the environment and planet came from just being in this pristine, natural ecosystem. I had the Amazon jungle in my backyard, was going to the ocean, and was able to breathe fresh air every single day. To me as a child, this was the norm. That was what life should look like, being surrounded by different species of birds and insects, and that was just my reality. I then watched Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth when I was 12 years old, and my entire reality came crashing down when I learned about climate change and global warming. That was just the catalytic moment for me to realise this crisis will affect my generation. It will affect millions of people. That day when I was a kid, I put it on my shoulders to try to do something about solving this climate crisis.
As founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA), can you please share how is this global organisation is empowering environmental entrepreneurs?
My journey to found SOA started when I was in college. I was a freshman and didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. My education was in economics and political science, so I knew I wanted to influence policy and tackle things on a systematic level but didn't necessarily know what I would do and how I would make that happen. Throughout my college career, I put on events, brought together young people and world leaders to have this dialogue and truly start having a conversation around building solutions. At a United Nations meeting, I sat listening to so many scientists telling us the warnings and data. My problem was that I didn't see anyone get up and say, 'and this is the solution, and this is how we're actually going to change things.' My idea was what if I could build an organisation that could prepare the next generation to not just be angry, depressed and frustrated? As I'm sure a lot of people listening feel, it's not a pleasant topic. When you're talking about the potential destruction of our planet and our own demise, it's not something you want to sit with. But at the same time, you feel all these emotions of hopelessness, and you feel the frustration and anger.
I thought to myself, what if we could channel all of those emotions into building solutions, into empowering young people to have ideas, and to think through their own communities and how they can solve things in their own way with the resources that they might have?
At SOA, we provide young people access to education, mentorship, and funding to support any idea from the grassroot level all the way to a for-profit start-up company.
What practices are most negatively impacting the health of our oceans?
What we must make clear is that ocean problems are not in a silo. When we talk about the ocean, we're also talking about the climate crisis, because one of the biggest problems we have is that because we're putting out so many fossil fuel emissions into the environment, the ocean is sucking up carbon emissions which is making the ocean warmer and more acidic. Just imagine living in a bubble of water where your natural ecosystem has a set pH level, a set temperature, and without having any control over this bubble of water you're in, other external influences are changing how you can operate, how you can mate, how you can breathe and how you can eat. That's exactly the pressure we're putting on our ocean. Us as humans, we are changing the temperatures so drastically that we're seeing coral reefs acidifying, we are seeing migration of species change from one day to the other because they no longer have a habitat. We are seeing masses of icebergs melting to the point where sea level rise is inevitable.
We have to understand that the climate crisis and our emissions directly impact the ocean, so then the question becomes why is the ocean important? Why should we care about the ocean? I'm sure a lot of people listening may not necessarily like snorkelling or scuba diving or might not live near the ocean, but the reality is the ocean provides over 50% of the oxygen we breathe. That's a reality most people aren't aware of, because throughout our entire education, we've been taught trees are the primary source of oxygen and the removal of carbon dioxide, but it's not the full truth. Yes, trees play a role, and protecting our Amazon is imperative, but we also must protect the ocean to provide an opportunity for the phytoplankton, algae and sea grasses to give us the oxygen we need. That's one important aspect indicating the importance of the ocean. The second one is that 3.1 billion people on this planet depend on the ocean as a primary source of protein. If you think about how much we're overfishing the ocean and how we are removing fish to the extent that we won't have any fish left in the ocean (which is happening), what are we going to do with a humanitarian crisis of 3.1 billion people not having access to fish? There are so many different interconnected situations that we must tackle. Then of course, you can look at pollution. We are using the ocean as our personal garbage bin. We have microplastics (that are the breakdown of larger plastic particles), which are now entering human bloodstreams. There has been microplastic identified in bloodstreams and even in pregnant women, and so you have this connectivity between the inputs we're putting out there and how it's coming back to affect our general health.
Where have you seen examples of people tackling these challenges faced by the ocean?
We're seeing people doing a lot of innovative work in creating start-ups and initiatives. You have youth leaders planting coral reefs where they are being destroyed. You have youth that are planting mangrove forests and rehabilitating them. We have other folks that are looking at restoring turtle populations to increase our biodiversity. These are very much on the grassroot initiative level. Then when you look at the start-ups we've been supporting, you have amazing companies like Aquaai. What Aquaai has done is they’ve built this really cool, autonomous underwater vehicle which looks like a fish and transmits visual and environmental data via cameras and sensors. That just gives either an agriculture farmer or a marine protected area scientist the ability to understand and know what's actually happening in the ocean. Aquaai are answering the question of how can we have the correct data we need to make decisions? Another company, CalWave, are using buoy technologies to capture the movement of waves and convert it into energy, which is amazing. We have another company called Sway, and they're using seaweed to replace plastic as a material, and it's utilising the plastic alternative and making film out of it, the film that we utilise for everything, whether we're wrapping things in the kitchen or things that are being utilised around plastic to wrap products. It's amazing to see that there is a disruption available in every single industry right now, because the way our infrastructure and economy has been set up has put profit first.
Now we have this opportunity to reinvent and re-engineer every single industry, and ask ourselves how we can make this sector more sustainable? How can we change this business so that's not harming our planet, but rather helping it heal?
That's where I think there is a lot of opportunities for anyone to get involved, no matter what background you have, you don't need to be a marine biologist, you don't have to be a scientist. You can be a data analyst, you can be an artist, or a teacher. Everyone has to play a role in helping us come up with better solutions for our ocean.
Why is it important to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in young people who are seeking to generate a positive change?
I think it's imperative we take all the negativity around this conversation in the climate and ocean space and transform it into something that is actionable, tangible and something that your everyday person can do. I have the experience of talking to so many people who say, "I want to make a difference, I want to help." But they have no idea where to start. There are some actions that they can take by changing their habits, for example, and consuming less meat. They can cut their energy consumption or do an energy audit. But a lot of folks just feel like it's not enough, and I would agree with that sentiment. It's not enough. The idea here is how can we change the narrative, and instead of only saying to young people, "go and write a letter to your politician or go and sign a petition," how can we say, "let's utilise your innovative thinking, your own ability to come up with solutions that most people in power won't have."
The beauty about this work is that we are asking people to tell us what their needs are. Tell us what solutions you see based on what you're facing in your own community. The approach is not a top down approach, it's rather a bottom up approach in which we are listening to their needs and insights.
This is whether it be an indigenous community telling us how in the past the Earth and humans lived in harmony together or people in coastal communities telling us how to actually grow mangroves. I think it's a very beautiful catalytic relationship you can have with us as an entity, empowering people but providing resources, education, funding and mentorship to catalyse them to take their ideas, feel empowered, recognised, and that there's some type of family and support system behind them. I think that's why having this entrepreneurial spirit is so critical, because we only have seven years left before the tipping point. When I reference the tipping point, I'm talking about potentially reaching a two degrees Celsius increase, in which when we get to that point in our temperature, there's no coming back. I'm talking about the tipping point of iceberg’s melting to the point where we can't refreeze them. There are so many tipping points in our biodiversity. We are getting to a point where we're losing species at an insane rate, and we can't come back from that anymore. We have to act and think about how every single day matters, and how every person has a role to play. If you're not working in the ecopreneur space and you don't have an entrepreneurial spirit, you can join one! You can join a project or initiative, so I would encourage people to think about it in both ways; not only being an entrepreneur, but also supporting those that are creating solutions.
What are some innovative technologies you are seeing emerging, and how are they related to creating a social and an oceanic impact?
There's another amazing start-up company that's called Whale Seeker, and what they're doing is they're using proprietary AI technology to detect and protect whales from getting hit by massive cargo ships. Of course, we're talking about the importance of not hitting a whale, which to some people may not be as critical. But the reality is if we don't protect whales, we are also threatening the ecosystem by taking out one of the key species, so that's important. Also, whales are responsible for utilising carbon emissions and being a carbon sink, so that's another property whales have.
Whale Seeker is really thinking about how can we utilise existing technology that we have put to use for the sake of software or making our day-to-day life easier to protect our planet?
Another company I'll mention is Coral Vita. What Coral Vita has done is they’ve found a way to grow corals that are more resilient to warming temperatures. They can grow the corals 50 times faster in their farms and in dry land, and then they go with the corals and plant them back into the ocean. It's so amazing to see how much innovation and ingenuity exists out there, and the question is how we can accelerate this ingenuity, because we need to bring all of these solutions to market as soon as possible, because again, we are running out of time. Those are some of the other initiatives that I have been really excited to see.
To finish off, are there any books or resources that you would want to recommend to our listeners?
The first thing I recommend is for everyone to get educated on the topic of deep seabed mining. Right now, this is the biggest threat we are facing as a collective, as humanity. There is a group of corporations that is asking the UN body that protects the deep sea, which is called the International Sea Mining Authority, to give these corporations licenses to mine the deep sea. The problem that we have is that number one, we don't have enough information, scientific data and discoveries in the deep sea to know what will happen if we actually disturb this pristine ecosystem and this pristine space. Number two, scientists have proven that any type of disruption will immediately cause biodiversity loss in the deep sea, and of course if you talk about the importance of keeping carbon emissions down, there is frozen methane at the bottom of the deep sea that if disturbed will increase our chances of having more emissions. When I first started hearing about this issue of corporations wanting to mine the deep sea, it just made no sense to me, because the reality is that is we have so many other ocean, climate and planetary issues we need to tackle, and yet we are coming back to the essence of greed and profit over the sake of our planet.
We are trying to educate as many people as possible to tell their governments they are not going to be accepting of this mining of the deep sea, because it's not necessary. It's going to profit a few and it's going to derail the progress we've made protecting our ocean.
That's one area that I recommend people to pay attention to, to research and to become more educated in. In terms of other books or films, my favourite film is Racing Extinction. I recommend that one, it's amazing. The other film I just saw recently is called Breaking Boundaries, and this film is all around the boundaries we are currently facing with our planetary crisis. It goes through the ocean crisis, the climate crisis, the water crisis, and the deforestation crisis. It's a good educational, overarching information film to give you a sense of what's going on and what's at stake. In terms of reading, Bloomberg has an amazing newsletter on climate and so does Forbes.
