The Spolight Webinar co-hosted by GreenWave US and Greenwave Aotearoa highlighted advancements and future opportunities in Aotearoa New Zealand’s rimurimu-seaweed sector, featuring insights from industry leaders on scaling production, ecological restoration, and regenerative ocean farming.

In October, Greenwave Aotearoa and EnviroStrat hosted the Kelp for Climate Tour with UK seaweed expert Peter Green. His keynote at the Aotearoa New Zealand Seaweed Summit explored seaweed’s role in climate resilience, biodiversity, and sustainable economic growth, with global experts discussing blue carbon and high-value market opportunities in New Zealand’s emerging seaweed sector.

Kinanomics and Greenwave Aotearoa were the proud major sponsors of the Kelp Forest Photo Awards.

Aaron Eger from Kelp Forest Alliance shares his thoughts on the purpose behind this event, which ask us how we create and maintain personal connections to a rapidly changing ocean?

The "Hidden Forests Around Us" theme invited photographers to capture how kelp forests are connected to our daily lives and how we as a society can build a new relationship with our ocean to save them.

Our goal is audacious. We are setting up Aotearoa New Zealand seaweed farmers for a new industry that could be a game changer.

It’s a slow, tender process to hatch a new seaweed industry - though our cultivation of Gigartina (Sarcothalia) atropurpurea also needed a bit of ‘treating it mean to keep it keen’.

We’re happy to share that as a result of painstaking work by Greenwave Aotearoa, tiny babies of fertile Gigartina tetrasporophyte have now settled onto twine ready for the next groundbreaking milestone – to be the first commercial out planting of this species in New Zealand.

We’ve been talking with seaweed researchers and entrepreneurs in New Zealand and globally to explore the viability of blue carbon methodology for seaweed production. In the absence of a verified method or market anywhere in the world to monetise blue carbon and nutrient credits from seaweed, we are looking at the potential of establishing a fund as a bespoke ‘environmental subsidy’ for future GreenWave Aotearoa farmers. The goal of the fund would be to provide financial support for regenerative ocean farmers to scale their practices, while incentivising climate impact, water quality and biodiversity data reporting.

We’ve been talking with seaweed researchers and entrepreneurs in New Zealand and globally to explore the viability of blue carbon methodology for seaweed production. In the absence of a verified method or market anywhere in the world to monetise blue carbon and nutrient credits from seaweed, we are looking at the potential of establishing a fund as a bespoke ‘environmental subsidy’ for future GreenWave Aotearoa farmers. The goal of the fund would be to provide financial support for regenerative ocean farmers to scale their practices, while incentivising climate impact, water quality and biodiversity data reporting.

In collaboration with Cawthron Institute, we’re undertaking environmental monitoring at both the Esk Point and Pōnui farm sites. Purpose-built ocean going sensors have been deployed and are measuring water temperatures and light penetration throughout the water column to monitor the growing environment at various depths. This will help us get a better understanding of whether high light intensity and warmer water temperatures are impacting the survival of the seedlings.

We’ve been testing techniques to help protect seedlings and increase survival during outplanting. We’re also starting to introduce automation in the outplanting process. We replaced the manual winding of the seeding twine onto grow ropes with a purpose built outplanting machine developed by the University of Waikato aquaculture team in collaboration with the School of Engineering which has reduced the number of people required to outplant.

We’re continually testing new methods to increase the efficiency of the hatchery process. A key advancement has been the development of methods to successfully maintain broodstock in tanks and induce formation of reproductive tissue on demand.