Restor and the Mangrove Breakthrough have announced a strategic partnership, marking a milestone in the global effort to restore, protect, and finance one of the planet’s most vital ecosystems: mangroves.

The Mangrove Breakthrough team revealed the first steps of a financial strategy at UNOC, linked to a collaborative partnership with the Restor platform which enables us to aggregate mangrove projects, under the Breakthrough brand, in an interactive world map where you can zoom in to the polygon and view each project individually. Not only does that give us transparency, it enables us to include and elevate the work of our partners or members and help make their projects discoverable by potential financiers in a global portfolio.

Creating a project pipeline of this scale naturally raises concerns around safeguarding and project quality. Mangroves and other blue carbon ecosystems are socioecological systems where humans and nature are often linked, whether that’s through access to resources, fisheries and food security, or coastal protection.

As part of our strategy to address this risk, the Mangrove Breakthrough is officially adopting the High-Quality Blue Carbon Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel as a quality assurance tool across its global project portfolio.

 “ORRAA is excited to welcome the Mangrove Breakthrough’s adoption of the HQBC Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel. Together, these tools ensure that the global mangrove community is aligned on high integrity and high-quality standards. This both de-risks and builds the confidence of potential investors, funders, intermediaries and communities. It is crucial to unlocking the public and private sector finance needed to scale up investment into blue nature-based solutions,” emphasized Karen Sack, ORRAA’s Executive Director. 

The Mangrove Breakthrough adopted a principled approach to implementation in 2023 – you can find the Mangrove Breakthrough Principles here and they are explored further in the Global Mangrove Alliance’s Best Practice Guidelines for Mangrove restoration. We needed a solution which would enable us to operationalize the Breakthrough’s principles and integrate them into the project pipeline in a practical and cost-efficient way. For this, we were able to draw on lessons learned from blue carbon markets, and particularly from the High-Quality Blue Carbon Principles and Guidance and the subsequent Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel.

The Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel were released as a prototype in 2024 and have been extensively tested throughout 2025. The Progress Wheel adapts the Society for Ecological Restoration “recovery wheel” project tracking tool to align with the Mangrove Breakthrough Principles and the High-Quality Blue Carbon Principles. This multiple-choice self-assessment framework integrates over 100 real-world KPIs from high-quality projects and respected safeguarding standards, including Verra CCB, Gold Standard, Plan Vivo, UNEP, FAO, World Bank, and the Green Climate Fund. This enables projects to monitor and evaluate their implementation progress in alignment with the principles, and communicate this progress in an easy to understand visual format. The Progress Wheel is supported by the Practitioners Guide manual, which contains links to open access project development and management resources laid out to match the structure of the self-assessment framework.

‍

“At last week’s Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) conference we saw how years of iterative development and testing have produced SER Wheel & 5* frameworks for both The Global Biodiversity Standard and the UN Decade’s Standard for Ecological Restoration. Mapping our own guiding principles to the SER Wheel not only supports the Mangrove Breakthrough and GMA in a very practical way, but also builds consistency and alignment across these global initiatives” - Ben Christ, Manager of the Global Mangrove Alliance 

When the revised Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel Version 2.0 is released, we will work with Restor to integrate the tool into project profiles in the Breakthrough digital pipeline. This will enable us to view at a glance the annual progression of projects within the Mangrove Breakthrough’s global portfolio, begin to identify the points at which financial or technical support are most commonly needed, and tailor the efforts of the Global Mangrove Alliance expert working groups and the Mangrove Breakthrough’s Technical Assistance Facility to address challenges at scale.

“The partnership with Restor marks a critical step in our collective journey. Together, we are upping transparency and accountability in mangrove protection and restoration,” said Ignace Beguin Billecocq, Executive Director of the Mangrove Breakthrough. “We are turning ambition into action—transforming data into dialogue, and ecosystems into enduring legacies.”

By 2030, the partnership will track progress against the 15 million hectares of restored and protected mangroves' goal set by the Mangrove Breakthrough, whilst helping to channel $4 billion in critical investment towards their protection and restoration. 

Central to this collaboration is the creation of a shared digital infrastructure: a platform that empowers not just data experts, but also local communities to actively participate and contribute. To strengthen the impact, Restor will also integrate and align its efforts with Global Mangrove Watch, the leading geospatial monitoring platform for mangroves, and Capital for Climate, a platform that connects investors engaged in climate and nature investment themes to a global pipeline of Nature-based Solutions opportunities.

As we scale up mangrove conservation and restoration, we must ensure that every project safeguards nature, empowers people, and delivers lasting impact.

Development of the High-Quality Blue Carbon Practitioners Guide and Progress Wheel has been supported by the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) and led by Conservation International, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, The World Economic Forum, Friends of Ocean Action, Salesforce and the International Blue Carbon Institute, and featuring contributions from a range of experts from across corporate partners, project developers, and the Global Mangrove Alliance.

‍