Our world is changing rapidly, businesses are facing ever increasing pressures from supply chain disruptions, societal expectations and evolving environmental regulations.
Many people ask us at Oyster Heaven how we make money and why anyone would want to partner with us. At its core, we unlock value for the organisations that we work with by avoiding real costs. The costs we help to avoid come from three places in a business.
The first and most obvious set of partners and clients are those facing idiosyncratic compliance issues. Increasingly around the world organisations are being compelled to address ecological issues as part of a licence application or to avoid a fine. That might be reducing ambient bioactive nitrogen in the coastal water or to restore an oyster reef.
This is our most obvious sales pitch. An organisation is told that they need to restore nature – particularly native oysters, as part of their license conditions or statutory requirements. Now we have been quietly becoming capable of restoring native oysters at scale. We can get licenses to do the job and are executing our first four commercial scale projects. This is putting us in a good place to answer the requests that come our way. The question we ask our potential partners is this:
If you are compelled to restore an oyster reef, wouldn’t you like to partner with a provider that has a proven history of cost-effective, large-scale oyster reef restoration that works in today’s systems and policies?
Many organisations depend on a stable supply chain of natural resources, especially those involved in food production or marine-related industries. Ecological degradation, particularly looking at examples like the North Sea threaten this stability. Oyster Heaven enhances supply chain resilience by restoring oyster reefs, which improve water quality, increase coastal stabilisation (when installed thoughtfully) and replenish fish stocks.
In the same way as an organisation might invest in its coffee supply chain to make sure that they can ensure the availability and price of coffee beans in the face of climate change, organisations are starting to invest in natural infrastructure to support the resilience of fish stocks or coastal farming at risk of damage from tidal surges.
There are of course a new set of complexities when in the marine environment that need to be overcome. Particularly when looking at the financial justification for investment. These arise from gaining resolution on the actual outcomes of these investments to judge their value. Luckily we are enjoying the advent of a new age of technological support to create compelling cases for investment into the ocean. Through digital twins, ROVs, satellite data, eDNA or bathymetry creating a financial case for investment into marine supply chains is now finally possible. With predictive analytics, good data and food webs based on all this data collection we can ask a great question to potential partners and clients:
Are you willing to invest today to ensure that your ingredients are available and at a reasonable price in 10 years time?
Anticipating and preparing for broader regulation is crucial for long-term business success. This has been demonstrated time and time again in history. In the mid 1970s Toyota started preparing for the clean air act in the US and launched passenger model cars with three way catalytic converters already installed. This helped the company avoid potential fines and production delays as well as deepening goodwill with the public and regulators.
When Biodiversity Net Gain was enforced in England in 2024, property companies in scope had been preparing a strategy to meet this requirement up to 6 years in advance in some cases. This might seem keen, but it was of the most basic business sense. Working with nature takes time and without compliance, they would not be allowed to build more homes.
It is safe to say that a host of European regulation is on its way. The transition to an ecologically stable future is crystal clear. Whether it is the EU Nature Restoration Law demanding 20% of land and sea restored by 2030. Scotland’s Marine Planning Framework requiring projects in the water must contribute to reduction of eutrophication and ecosystem recovery or the Water Framework Directive requiring ‘good ecological status’ for all EU surface waters including estuaries and coastal waters, each have a conceptually beautiful space for our work.
Organisations and governments will naturally start to prepare for incoming unavoidable regulation to ensure that the cost burden is not unmanageable. We are already starting to work with organisations in preparation for exactly that.
Does your organisation want to invest ahead of time in preparation to meet the regulations and requirements that are already underway?
Oyster Heaven offers more than just ecological restoration; we create value by helping organisations or governments avoid real financial costs. This business model focusing on selling resilience services means we do not have to constantly seek government or philanthropic funding to support our ambitions.
Every project we create will generate the seed money for the next and then the next. A virtuous cycle that can start to reverse the decline of our precious oceans.
Make a measurable difference for the ocean today.
You can now adopt a Mother Reef and help restore 100 oysters!
