Ocean data is essential to responsible financing in the blue economy. Quantifying the ocean risk that marine operators face can unlock new forms of risk transfer and investments into historically overlooked ocean businesses. To date, there has been minimal private equity footprint in salmon aquaculture, despite its high profitability. This is because the volatility of ocean-driven risk is difficult to navigate without ocean expertise. We developed a global model to simulate the market, biological, and ocean dynamics for over 3,500 Atlantic salmon farm sites. Alongside site-level farm production, our model tracks sustainability metrics, starting with emissions intensity relative to earnings. Translated to an institutional-scale allocation across the wider global industry, we find that salmon aquaculture offered risk-adjusted returns in the top quintile of all US or European stocks across recent decades and a historical impact-and-risk-adjusted return that is 31 times larger than US agriculture and livestock as a whole.
These insights equip institutional investors, such as pension funds and private equity, with the ability to make the three-dimensional tradeoff between risk, return, and impact in a highly specialized industry. The application of well-modeled and constrained ocean conditions to quantify the financial risk of investments is an important step in broadening the blue economy.