Kiki Egli

The Kelp Economy started as a research question and became a bigger one. In 2025, while completing a master's Capstone project, I set out to understand why kelp, one of the ocean's most productive ecosystems, was struggling to attract investment despite its measurable ecological value.

Most environmental finance frameworks are built around carbon. They reward permanence, measurability, and standardized accounting: qualities that sediment-based ecosystems like mangroves and salt marshes have, and that kelp, with its more complex sequestration pathways, currently lacks. But kelp delivers something carbon metrics can't easily capture. Its benefits are fast, repeatable, and stackable: biodiversity, water quality, coastal resilience, habitat creation. And they align directly with how companies are increasingly required to report their relationship to nature.

That mismatch, between what kelp provides and what existing frameworks reward, became the central argument of my research and the central question of this platform: how do we build financial systems that can see the full value of natural assets?

Around the same time, I was advising a consultancy on a marine-focused philanthropic initiative supporting oceanographic institutions across the US, Bermuda and the UK. That work gave me a different kind of education: in how institutions think about impact, how funders assess risk, and how the gap between scientific evidence and financial decision-making plays out in practice.

The Kelp Economy is where those two strands come together. It uses kelp as an entry point into a larger conversation about natural capital, nature-based finance, and the systems we need to build if ecosystems are going to be recognized as the productive infrastructure they actually are.

“Kelp's challenge is not a lack of ecological benefit. It is a mismatch between what kelp provides and what current frameworks are designed to reward.”

Researcher and strategist exploring how nature-based systems become scalable climate infrastructure.

EDUCATION

Harvard University
Master’s of Arts (ALM), Sustainability
2026

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
BA, Economics & BA, Political Science
2009