Ocean Heroes: The Man in the Room Where Ocean Solutions Are Judged
Craig Taylor helps decide which ocean projects the world’s most prestigious environmental prize chooses to back.
Every year, thousands of projects are nominated for The Earthshot Prize across five categories. One of them, Revive Our Oceans, exists to find the solutions that might repair the sea by 2030. Most nominations go no further, a handful become finalists, and one each year wins a million pounds and a global stage.
Craig Taylor is one of the people who helps decide which.
He serves as an Expert Advisor to the Prize within the Revive Our Oceans category. The role, as he describes it, is to help identify, review and assess ocean conservation solutions before they reach the people who pick the winners.
This is Ocean Heroes. Each month, I write about someone who changed what’s possible for the sea. Scientists. Lawyers. Activists. Fishers. Artists. Indigenous leaders. Some are still working. Some we’ve lost. All of them have strived to leave the ocean different than they found it.
Taylor came to the judging room, in his words, through a combination of experience and network: years working in marine ecosystems, ocean policy, stakeholder engagement and international partnerships, alongside governments, NGOs, conservation leaders, businesses and local communities. “The Earthshot Prize recognises that solving environmental challenges requires expertise from many different perspectives,” he says, “and I was honoured to be invited to contribute to that process.”
The Prize’s own page for its Expert Advisory Panel, a global group of more than 100 subject-matter experts, fills in the rest: a multi-award-winning B Corp entrepreneur with more than 30 years in conservation and environmental leadership, a long-time advocate for shark and ocean conservation, and an experienced scuba diver whose field work spans Africa and Asia.
This is a conversation about what happens inside that process: what the judges look for, what separates a finalist from a winner, and the question worth asking of any prize, which is what winning actually changes.
How a project wins
The selection runs in stages, and Taylor describes the process as exceptionally rigorous.
“Thousands of nominations are received globally through Earthshot’s network of nominators,” he says. “Those nominations are then assessed through multiple stages involving subject matter experts, independent reviewers and specialist advisory panels.”
Projects are not judged simply on whether they are doing good work. “They are assessed against a range of criteria including impact, innovation, evidence, scalability, feasibility and their potential to accelerate environmental progress at a global level.”
For the ocean category specifically, he says the judges want solutions that can genuinely contribute to restoring ocean health, whether through technology, policy, community-led conservation, finance, fisheries management or habitat restoration. “They are also looking for solutions that can inspire others. Earthshot is not simply recognising success. It is identifying approaches that can be replicated, scaled or adapted elsewhere.”
The record bears this out. The ocean finalists and winners since 2021 span exactly that range: Coral Vita, the coral restoration project that took the first ocean prize in 2021; Living Seawalls, the Australian finalist retrofitting marine habitat onto sea walls; Pristine Seas, the marine protected area initiative, a finalist the same year; the Queensland Indigenous Women’s Ranger Network, which won in 2022; Coast4c, a 2024 finalist working on sustainable seaweed; and the High Seas Treaty, which won in 2025.
What separates a finalist from a winner
Finalists are already exceptional, Taylor says. They have measurable impact and they are addressing problems that matter. So what tips one into winning?
“If I had to identify one distinguishing characteristic it would be transformational potential,” he says. “Winners tend to combine impact with a unique ability to accelerate change far beyond their current footprint. The judges look at whether Earthshot’s support, visibility and funding can act as a catalyst that unlocks significantly greater impact.”
The strength of the team matters, because even the best idea needs people who can deliver it. Scalability matters, but it is not decisive on its own. “Some highly localised solutions can still become winners if they provide a model that others can adopt elsewhere.”
Then he names something less obvious. Timing. “Sometimes a solution arrives at precisely the moment when the world is ready for it, and Earthshot can help propel it from a promising initiative into a global movement.”
The honest question
The High Seas Treaty won the ocean prize in 2025. The Treaty was the product of nearly two decades of diplomacy, scientific advocacy and negotiation involving thousands of people, almost none of it connected to a prize founded in 2020. So what does it mean to say Earthshot won it anything?
Taylor does not dodge it.
“There is an important distinction,” he says. “The Earthshot Prize does not claim ownership of solutions. The High Seas Treaty was the result of decades of diplomatic effort, scientific advocacy and international cooperation involving thousands of people around the world.”
What the Prize does, he says, is recognise and amplify. “By spotlighting the High Seas Treaty, it helps communicate why this achievement matters to a global audience, and why implementation now becomes the critical next step. In many ways, Earthshot acts as an accelerator rather than an inventor. It identifies initiatives that are already creating change and helps them achieve greater impact, visibility and momentum.”
That is a clearer account than most prizes offer of themselves. It is also the right frame for reading every impact claim attached to the Prize. When Earthshot points to its 2021 finalist Pristine Seas having helped establish thirty of the largest marine protected areas in the world, covering 6.9 million square kilometres, that is, by Earthshot’s own account, Pristine Seas’ work. The Prize’s contribution is the spotlight, the network, the platform.
Asked what the Prize itself has changed at its halfway mark, Taylor returns to two words: visibility and acceleration. “Many conservation initiatives struggle not because the solution is weak, but because they lack the funding, credibility, partnerships or global platform needed to reach the next stage,” he says. “Earthshot has become a trusted global signal that says, this solution works, and the world should pay attention. That recognition opens doors.” For the ocean specifically, he argues the Prize has helped bring marine protection, sustainable fisheries, ocean restoration and blue finance, money raised specifically for ocean and water projects, into mainstream conversations beyond the conservation sector.
It is an optimist’s case, and it is also the case a prize would naturally make for itself. The harder evidence, what measurably changed in the water because a project won rather than because the project already existed, is not yet something a five-year-old prize can fully show. Taylor’s framing does not pretend otherwise. He claims acceleration, not authorship.
The solution he thinks is underrated
Asked what ocean solution he thinks is most underestimated, Taylor names a category rather than a project.
“Community-led ocean conservation,” he says. “The conservation sector often focuses on technology, large-scale finance or international policy. While all are important, some of the most effective solutions originate from coastal communities that depend directly on healthy marine ecosystems.”
Local fishers, Indigenous peoples and coastal communities often hold generations of ecological knowledge and the strongest incentive to keep marine resources sustainable, he says. “When these communities are given the authority, tools and support to manage their marine environments, the results can be extraordinary. The future of ocean conservation will not be delivered solely by governments, scientists or NGOs. It will be delivered through genuine partnerships with the people who live alongside the ocean every day.”
The Prize’s record supports him. The 2022 ocean winner, the Queensland Indigenous Women’s Ranger Network, is exactly the kind of community-led model he describes: Indigenous women rangers protecting the Great Barrier Reef coast.
Where it should go next
Taylor wants the next five years to connect ocean conservation more directly to the things people already care about. “Too often the ocean is viewed as an environmental issue rather than critical infrastructure that supports food security, climate stability, livelihoods, tourism, trade and economic prosperity.”
He wants more visibility for Small Island Developing States, the island nations for whom ocean health is a matter of national survival, alongside Indigenous-led conservation, coastal community innovation, and financing that can unlock restoration at a meaningful scale. He also wants solutions that join things up. “Ocean conservation does not stop at the shoreline. The future lies in connecting land, freshwater, coastal habitats, communities, finance and governance into systems that work together.”
The Prize is halfway through its run. Twenty-five of its planned fifty winners have been named, five of them for the ocean, and five ceremonies are still to come.
When the next round of nominations arrives, Craig Taylor will be one of the people reading them. Most will never get near a stage or a million pounds. All of them will get a serious look from someone who has spent thirty years working out what actually works. That seems like a good person to have in the room.
Craig Taylor is an ocean conservation strategist and CEO of OPR Consulting. He serves as an Expert Advisor to The Earthshot Prize in the Revive Our Oceans category. Nominations for The Earthshot Prize are made through its official nominator network. You can connect with Craig and follow his journey on LinkedIn here.