The blue economy: what’s really new?

Yannick Beaudoin

By GRID-Arendal

November 17^th, 2017

"Blue economy” is a term making the rounds these days. It refers to the use of aquatic (i.e. oceans, lakes, rivers) resources for economic activities meant to support societal development.

That being said, is there anything new about the concept of a blue economy? How could it be since water lies at the base of all natural processes and is the pillar upon which human civilization has thrived (or declined) for millennia?

For ancient Egyptians, the blue economy was tied to the moods of the Nile and was at the center of all things. North American Indigenous Peoples had inland and coastal waterways underpinning their blue economy lifelines for commerce, food security and transport. Scandinavian Vikings added their own particular blue economy flair when they sailed across the ocean to secure other nations’ shiny things. In more modern times, industrialization has been shaped by offshore activities like resource extraction, fishing, energy and transport. Civilisation has relied on the blue economy for millennia.

However, there is a newness to this approach linked to the pressures that have resulted from decades of unsustainable economic growth that ignored critical natural limits. This sense of the blue economy being something new comes from the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed to at the United Nations in 2015, and which aim to balance our human needs with nature’s capacity to provide for those needs. So while a blue economy is not a new concept, a sustainable blue economy is.

A sustainable blue economy requires us to rethink what countries wish to derive from water-based activities. Is the intent to simply grow the scale of activities in order to increase financial wealth and our Gross Domestic Product? Or is the intent to increase human well-being and progress while maintaining natural health and operating within planetary limits? The decades of unsustainability which we are now having to deal with and challenging decisions show us that these two pathways are incompatible.

A sustainable blue economy therefore will require “sustainable blue economics” or in other words, new, innovative ways to help direct our economic pursuits and monitor whether our endeavours are achieving the progress we seem to desire. While the measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can tell you how a typical blue economy is doing, it can’t tell you how well you're doing with respect to a sustainable blue economy. That’s because GDP is designed to measure how much production and consumption is happening in an economy as well as the value of financial transactions that support it. It’s a statistical framework and does not support the ability to measure the qualities that are essential to the well-being of people and planet.

The Sustainable Development Goals framework offers guidance into what could define sustainable blue economies. And yet that remains only part of the solution. For one thing, economics itself needs to evolve as a science. When the real world evidence contradicts the theoretical framework, that framework needs to be changed. So far, the pressure has been to make the real world fit a flawed framework. Considering that over 70% of the Earth is actually water, the recent global drive to establish sustainable blue economies offers an unprecedented opportunity to promote new economic thinking.