Ocean Visions Launches Seaweed Decarbonization Roadmap
Ocean Visions announced the launch of its Seaweed-Based Products for Decarbonization road map, a first-of-its-kind digital resource designed to help guide the responsible development and scaling of seaweed based products that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions across multiple industries.
Seaweed can play an important role in global decarbonization by replacing petroleum based ingredients in a variety of products. Seaweed grows rapidly without many of the inputs, such as freshwater, land, and fertilizers, that make conventional products emissions-intensive.
While seaweed aquaculture is already a major global industry, produced primarily for food and hydrocolloids, scaling seaweed-based products for decarbonization such as biofuels and bio-stimulants will require significant expansion, along with improved technologies and processes to cultivate, harvest, and process biomass efficiently.
Ocean Visions’ new road map highlights the scientific, economic, technological, and policy conditions needed for seaweed-based products to contribute meaningfully to global decarbonization. It focuses on five key sectoral opportunities:
Agricultural Uses
Biomaterials
Critical Minerals
Food Products and Animal Feed
Biofuels
The road map synthesizes expert insights on scientific readiness, engineering and production challenges, financing and market barriers, environmental and social considerations, and policy and governance needs. An evolving resource, it will be updated regularly as advances occur in science, technology, markets, and policy.
Ocean Visions will work with partners to mobilize effort and investment toward priorities identified in the road map and to help address infrastructure and market challenges that currently limit scale-up.
The initiative is part of Ocean Visions’ broader work to advance ocean-based pathways for decarbonization. Decarbonization will directly address major harm to the ocean as rising greenhouse gas emissions drive ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, threatening ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide.
Seaweed-based products are one of several ocean-based decarbonization pathways that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions at scale.
Ocean Visions works to accelerate the responsible development and scaling of potential ocean-climate solutions by identifying high-potential, underinvested opportunities, and convening experts across science, industry, and policy to mobilize action.
Development of the road map was guided by an advisory board that included Ling Cao (Xiamen University), Peter Green (Hatch Blue), Rod Fujita (formerly of Environmental Defense Fund), and Simon Freeman (Wetstone, formerly ARPA-E Mariner program). The process included a deep assessment of all available information about potential product pathways, and the evidence base was further shaped during a May-June 2026 public comment period.