MINDEROO FOUNDATION
Andrew Forrest has been enraptured by the ocean since he was a boy, so much so that five years ago, after building a multibillion-dollar fortune, he went back to school to study it.
Australia’s second-richest person re-enrolled at his alma mater, the University of Western Australia, to pursue a PhD in marine ecology. The businessman and philanthropist, who owes much of his fortune to mining, didn’t think graduate school would be a breeze, but he also wasn’t quite prepared for how much work it turned out to be. “There was no work-life balance over that fouryear period,” he tells Robb Report. He earned his title of ‘Dr’ in 2019.
But while his studies may have been gruelling, they also illuminated the complexities of the seas’ problems. Under the guidance of Professor Jessica Meeuwig, the head of the university’s Marine Futures Lab, Forrest focused on the pelagic area offshore – “That’s where the most damage has been done,” he says – and began to truly understand the devastating toll pollution, overfishing and climate change are taking on the marine world.
In 2001, well before returning to school, Forrest and his wife, Nicola, started Minderoo Foundation, which looks for progressive solutions to the biggest issues facing Australia and the planet. His studies have helped guide its Flourishing Oceans conservation initiative, including two of its major programmes. The first is Sea the Future, which aims to reduce ocean pollution by pushing governments to mandate companies to reduce their reliance on new plastic production and use recycled plastic instead – or pay “producer responsibility fees”. Unfortunately, the cratering of the fossil-fuel market brought on by COVID-19 has hampered the effort by making new plastic even cheaper, but the foundation continues to push for the use of recycled plastic. The second project is OceanOmics, which collects and analyses environmental DNA in ocean waters to get a more accurate measure of marine life and develop better protections.
Although Forrest is confident that people now realise how dire the situation is, he believes that a failure to act quickly and decisively will prove catastrophic. It’s his hope that his family’s foundation, which is one of Australia’s biggest philanthropies and has over US$1.5 billion committed to its various initiatives, can play a part in turning the tide.
“Our oceans are sick,” Forrest says. “We have, I think, less than five years to save our oceans from the savage destruction from plastic waste. We have less than 10 years to save our oceans from savage repercussions of overfishing. This decade is the decade which I think will go down in history.”