Faith institutions hold an estimated 8 percent of the world's habitable land and shape the everyday ethics of 85 percent of humanity. On 15 June 2026, on the eve of the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, that constituency took its first formal seat at the ocean-finance table. At the Mombasa Continental Resort, the Ocean Interfaith Forum launched Faiths for 30×30 — The Faith High Ambition Coalition for Ocean and Nature Action, a global platform on which religious communities can register concrete, time-bound pledges to protect the ocean and report annually against them.
The forum, hosted by Faiths for Oceans and listed on the official Our Ocean Kenya events directory, brought together approximately 50 invited participants from Islamic, Christian and Hindu traditions of the Swahili coast, Indigenous spiritual authorities, artisanal fishers, scientists, theological advisors, and Kenyan county and national officials. It is convened the day before the 11th Our Ocean Conference, the first held on African soil, opens on 16 June.
From declaration to ledger
Faiths for 30×30 is the operational follow-on to Turning the Tide: A Multi-faith Declaration for the Ocean, which more than 300 faith organisations representing over half a billion people signed at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice in June 2025. The declaration was presented in Nice to UN Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen and UN Special Envoy for the Ocean Peter Thomson. The Mombasa launch converts that declaration into a public, searchable ledger.
Pledges sit in five categories: education, direct stewardship of coastal sites, advocacy with policymakers, community mobilisation, and financial divestment from ocean-harming industries. Each is tracked against two technical instruments: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's 30 percent ocean-protection target for 2030, and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement — the High Seas Treaty — which entered into force on 17 January 2026.
The platform is supported by the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative and Oceans5. The architecture is straightforward: a faith body registers a pledge, the platform standardises it for tracking, and annual progress reporting is published alongside the pledges of governments and corporations registered through the Our Ocean Conference itself.
A moral arithmetic
The reframing matters because of the underlying numbers. The Pew Charitable Trusts has noted that marine ecosystems represent 71 percent of the planet but receive only 14 percent of international conservation funding, and that only 10 percent of marine areas are protected globally against the 30-percent-by-2030 target. UN Trade and Development pegged 2025 ocean-related trade at USD 2.5 trillion. Conservation finance has not tracked the trade growth.
"The climate crisis is not merely an ecological or economic dilemma. At its core, it is a profound moral and spiritual crisis," Dr. Francis Kuria, Secretary General of Religions for Peace International and Secretary General of the African Council of Religious Leaders, wrote on 5 June 2026. He called on faith leaders to treat the phase-out of fossil fuels as "a first-order moral imperative" and to "commit religious landholdings to nature-based stewardship." Kuria, a Kenyan, sits at the centre of the Mombasa convening.
Peter Thomson, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Ocean, framed the broader gap in remarks earlier in June: "We must move beyond fragmented funding and secure sustainable finance that supports long-term ocean stewardship and resilience," he said, urging integrated ocean governance and the alignment of nationally determined climate contributions with national biodiversity strategies.
What it adds to OOC11
The Our Ocean Conference has registered more than 2,900 commitments worth over USD 169 billion since 2014; the 2025 Busan edition logged 287 commitments worth USD 9.1 billion. The Mombasa edition's dollar figure will land at the closing plenary on 18 June. The Faith Coalition introduces a different unit of account — institutional moral authority — into that ledger. The afternoon's "reef assembly" at the Mombasa Continental Resort, structured as a rights-of-nature dialogue blending science, theology and lived experience, gives Kenya's bleaching coral ecosystems a procedural voice few intergovernmental settings have offered before.
For OceanVines, the convening is a working example of the kind of community infrastructure ocean education depends on — local faith networks translating global targets into village-scale stewardship. We exist to illuminate the inner sparks of every life we touch through our efforts in ocean conservation and education, and the Mombasa forum suggests how that work can be scaled through institutions that already gather every Friday, Sunday and at every tide.
Together, we celebrate The Greatest Good.