A decade ago, the Ansari X Prize awarded $10 million to a team that built the first private spaceship that could be launched twice within two weeks, helping to spawn a $2 billion space industry. Now the X Prize’s backers are running a series of multimillion-dollar contests to jump-start an entirely new industry to save the world’s oceans.

“We still don’t value the ocean,” Paul Bunje, X Prize’s senior director of oceans, said at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. “Part of that is, quite frankly, because there’s little market economy associated with the opportunity of the ocean. We want people to be making money off of the sustainable use and protection of our oceans.”

That might involve spurring businesses that collect data on ocean conditions and provide related services.

The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize will award $2 million to the team that develops a low-cost sensor that can be deployed around the world to measure the acidification of the oceans caused by climate change. As the seas absorb ever-larger amounts of carbon dioxide they are growing more acidic, which kills the coral reefs that provide habitat for innumerable fish species.

The prize is the second of five ocean-related contests that will run through 2020. The first, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Spill Cleanup X Challenge, awarded $1 million to a team that developed a skimmer that cleans oil from water four times as fast as the industry standard. The three remaining prizes have not been determined but could cover anything from ocean plastic pollution to creating marine protected areas, according to Bunje.

While past X Prizes have focused on solving specific technological challenges—such as building a real-life version of the Star Trek Tricorder—the ocean contests are taking on a complex global issue.

The world’s seas suffer from overfishing, pollution, and global warming. Moreover, little is known about the environment vital to life on Earth—only about 5 percent of the seabed has been mapped, and a 2012 study estimated that two-thirds of marine species remain undiscovered.

“If you’re going to deal with something like oceans, it’s not good enough to do a one-off here, a one-off there,” said Bunje. “What we need to do is to build a movement, a global, massive, important, ongoing sense of momentum that will knock down every single one those barriers to change that are resulting in the sort of unhealthy, unsustainable path our oceans are on.”