Gen_We: A Regenerative Tourism System for Marine Protection

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Nanda Dias

Product Strategic Design

UX Design, Leadership, AI

Nanda Dias | Staff Designer

Most of us would help the ocean if we knew how. That is the gap I wanted to work on.

A solo project from a d.MBA cohort, still running as a personal lab alongside my day job. I built the business case, the behavioural model and the funding structure myself. The funding is the unsolved part, because restoration sits in a gap that commercial investment rarely reaches on its own.

The Challenge

Less than 3% of the ocean is highly protected. That same ocean produces more than half the oxygen we breathe.

The global 30x30 goal is to protect 30% of it by 2030. Marine protection currently receives around USD 1.2 billion a year. It needs 15.8 billion.

A gap of USD 14.6 billion a year. Money is not the only thing missing.

There is a second gap running alongside it. A lot of people want to do something real about the state of the ocean and have nowhere useful to put that intent. Recycling harder is not it. Donating and never hearing back is not it either.

Gen_We is a regenerative tourism concept built to close both gaps at once. It connects individual travellers to marine restoration work that is already happening, and turns their trip into funding and labour for the NGOs doing it.

My Role & Strategic Approach

I synthesised roughly 50 sources across economics, behavioural science, marine policy and business strategy, then made five decisions that define the concept.

1. Design for restoration, not growth. Grounded in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, so success is measured against a social floor and a planetary ceiling rather than against last quarter.

2. Attack the intention-action gap directly. Stephen Wendel’s CREATE funnel showed me where good intentions actually die. I used his “Cheat” strategy: shift the logistical burden off the traveller and the NGO, and put it on the product.

3. Fund it with blended finance. Grants and concessional capital de-risk the early stage so private investment can follow. Higher-tier contributors fund Impact Scholarships, so the community is not limited to people who can afford to travel.

4. Choose depth and trust over mass-market scale. This one closes doors on purpose. Curation protects the integrity of the conservation work, and it rules out the fast, ad-funded, high-volume version of this business.

5. Confirm the market was real before committing. Top-down sizing from Dataintelo and Grand View Research puts regenerative tourism at USD 185.2 billion in 2024, growing at 12.4% CAGR. That matters because a conservation product that only works on goodwill does not survive its first funding winter.

The Challenge

Less than 3% of the ocean is highly protected. That same ocean produces more than half the oxygen we breathe.

The global 30x30 goal is to protect 30% of it by 2030. Marine protection currently receives around USD 1.2 billion a year. It needs 15.8 billion.

A gap of USD 14.6 billion a year. Money is not the only thing missing.

My Role & Strategic Approach

I synthesised roughly 50 sources across economics, behavioural science, marine policy and business strategy, then made five decisions that define the concept.

1. Design for restoration, not growth. Grounded in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, so success is measured against a social floor and a planetary ceiling rather than against last quarter.

Here's the brief version, if a podcast suits your day better than reading.

Scaling Marine Conservation With Startup Logic

How this began

For three years I was a Product Design Lead at SAP, building carbon-calculation and ESG goal-management systems for large companies. I kept seeing the same appetite for purpose written into corporate sustainability strategy, and no equivalent for the person who actually wanted to help. David Attenborough's Ocean was the push. I wanted to find out whether the bridge could be built, without a company behind me.

The Tension I Am Not Resolving

I used generative AI, Obsidian and NotebookLM, to synthesise the research and produce the concept podcast and pitch materials. Without it this project would have taken five times longer, and I had no budget to hire collaborators at this stage. Every output was curated and rewritten by me, roughly ten passes each.

Is the energy cost of AI worth it on an environmental project? It is a fair question without a clean answer. For now I think a problem this urgent and this underfunded is worth using the tools we already have. I expect that view to keep changing.

The other thing I did not expect was that the value came from the people. Peers adding an anecdote or an angle I would never have reached made the learning stick in a way no tool did.

Want to dive into the details?

See the full pitch deck