The Caribbean Blue Economy

Peter Clegg, Robin Mahon, Patrick McConney, Hazel A. Oxenford, Peter Clegg, Robin Mahon, Patrick McConney, Hazel A. Oxenford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000227116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Blue Economy is emerging on the global scene as a powerful and persuasive new concept for sustainable development based on economic activities associated with the ocean. Several regions globally have adopted this concept at national and regional levels, including the Caribbean. Given the complex, multisectoral and multilevel nature of the Blue Economy, it is clear that different approaches will be needed for different regions. Hence, this volume explores the opportunities, threats and risks involved in operationalising the Blue Economy in the Wider Caribbean Region, defined as northern Brazil to the USA and all mainland and island countries and territories in-between.

The first part of the book looks at where the region stands in the global picture regarding adoption of the Blue Economy and what is planned. The second set of chapters examines key crosscutting issues such as ecosystem services, climate change and governance at national and regional levels that could make or break the Blue Economy initiative. The book then goes on to explore the main sectoral activities that will constitute the Blue Economies in the region: fisheries, tourism, shipping and transport, renewable energy, oil and gas, seabed mining and waste management are all considered. The book ends with a synthesis of the political and technical requirements to overcome threats and take advantage of opportunities in the Blue Economy.

1The Blue Economy as a global initiative

Pawan G. Patil, John Virdin and Charles S. Colgan

Introduction

Within the last five years, the concept of the Blue Economy has entered into widespread use around the world (Colgan, 2017). The list of countries whose governments have promoted this concept in various forms as a strategy for economic development has grown long, and examples include: Australia, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia and a number of small island developing states such as Grenada and Mauritius (European Commission, 2012; Surís-Regueiro et al., 2013; Salim, 2014; Sunoto, 2014; Zhao et al., 2014; Conathan and Moore, 2015; ANI, 2017; Cervigni and Scandizzo, 2017; Voyer et al., 2017). Across these countries the concept has been defined and applied very differently (Voyer et al., 2018; Colgan 2017), and as a result has been characterised at times as a “buzzword” that has general agreement in the abstract but not in practice (Bueger, 2015; Voyer et al., 2017).

In some cases, the Blue Economy concept has been promoted as a response to a vision of rapidly increasing human activity in the ocean, labelled an “economic frontier” for an expanding population searching for new sources of growth, equipped with emerging technologies that make the global ocean and its resources more accessible (Jouffray et al., 2020; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015). To some extent, the concept has evolved from the earlier idea of an “ocean economy”, which aimed to link a diverse set of economic activities and industries under one label, because they all in some way shared the ocean as a physical context (OECD, 2016). For this reason, the concept of the ocean economy first needs some description, and to be distinguished from the concept of a Blue Economy.

Defining ocean economy

As a precursor to the term Blue Economy, the term ocean economy was used by economists to collectively describe the diverse ocean-linked economic activity in a given space, and define this activity as a unique segment of the broader economy. The aim of the ocean economy concept was often to provide the basis for more integrated ocean policies that could capture economies of scale and reduce negative externalities by regulating together the various competing and overlapping uses of a given ocean space, rather than industry-by-industry or sector-by-sector (Colgan, 2017). The ocean economy concept is analogous to other segments of an economy where industries are interlinked by some common feature (in this case the ocean environment), such that they collectively function as a system rather than a fragmented list of individual sectors, e.g. the “bioeconomy” or the “information economy” (Park and Kildow, 2014; OECD, 2016).

For many years the term ocean economy was not consistently applied around the world, reportedly defined 14 different ways by 14 different countries in 2014 (Park and Kildow, 2014). However, in 2016 the OECD provided what has become a more universal definition for the ocean economy concept, as a term referring to “the sum of the economic activities of ocean-based industries, and the assets, goods and services of marine ecosystems”, including direct and indirect supporting activities necessary for the functioning of ocean-based industries (OECD, 2016).

Despite differences in definition, many countries have been working to measure the size of their ocean economy since the United States first attempted to estimate the contribution of ocean-related economic activity to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1974, for example in Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom (Colgan, 2016). As these efforts have expanded over the years, countries have begun to formalise them as part of their national economic accounting systems, by establishing dedicated ocean accounts that derive from and add to their national income and product accounts (Colgan, 2017). The activities and industries that countries have categorised as part of their ocean economy have varied by context, but have often included a core group of traditional marine industries: fisheries and aquaculture, marine construction, tourism and recreation, boat building and repair, marine transportation and minerals including oil and gas (Colgan, 2017). More recently, offshore wind can be added to this list, along with emerging industries such as offshore aquaculture (OECD, 2016).

Global estimates of the size of the ocean economy have varied (as have the estimation methods used), including the estimates shown in Table 1.1. Perhaps the most extensive effort to measure the size of the global ocean economy was by the OECD in 2016, estimating a gross value added of US$1.5 trillion in 2010 (2.5% of the global total) and 31 million direct full-time jobs (though small-scale fisheries were not included) (OECD, 2016). By this measure, the ocean economy would have ranked in the world’s top 12 national economies in 2010 (Patil et al., 2018).

Table 1.1 Examples of estimates of the size of the ocean economy

Estimation method	Estimated size of ocean economy (US$ trillion/year)	Source
Gross marine product	2.5	Hoegh-Guldberg et al. (2015)
Market value of marine and coastal resources	3.0	Global Ocean Commission (2014)
Annual gross revenues of ocean-linked industries	2.6	Golden et al. (2017)

Such measures of the ocean economy have rarely accounted for sustainability, often capturing only the economic output. However, over time the concept has evolved to reflect environmental and social considerations, coinciding with wider recognition of human-driven changes in the status of the ecosystems underpinning the ocean economy. As countries tried to adjust to the twin trends of accelerating growth in the ocean economy and the decline of the underlying ecosystems, in the last decade many began to use the perspective of a “Green Economy” as a lens for trying to decouple economic growth and environmental degradation in the ocean (Patil et al., 2016). The term “Green Economy” was broadly applied to the ocean at the 2012 Rio +20 Summit, and subsequently the term “Blue Economy” became a more prominent feature in international policy dialogue on the ocean.

At the time of Rio+20 and soon after, the term Blue Economy was not universally defined, but rather reflected multiple and competing discourses on human–ocean relations, including: (i) the oceans as natural capital, (ii) the oceans as “good business”, (iii) the oceans as integral to small island developing states (SIDS) and (iv) the oceans as a source of small-scale fishing livelihoods (Silver et al., 2015). The concept was the subject of a number of international summits held in the years following Rio+20 (e.g. the global ocean action summit for food security and blue growth hosted by the Government of the Netherlands in 2014,¹ the world ocean summit on financing the sustainable ocean economy organised by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2017² and the global sustainable Blue Economy conference hosted by the Government of Kenya in 2018,³ to name a few), and was reflected in FAO’s 2014 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report (Patil et al., 2016). Yet among all of these discussions, the concept remained broadly and poorly defined.

Perhaps most commonly in the years after Rio+20, the Blue Economy concept has de facto been defined as a shorthand for sustainable development of the ocean. A widely cited white paper by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2015 characterised the concept as a “sustainable ocean economy”, which “emerges when economic activity is in balance with the long-term capacity of ocean ecosystems to support this activity and remain resilient and healthy” (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015). In 2017 the World Bank and United Nations defined the Blue Economy as “comprising the range of economic sectors and related policies that together determine whether the use of oceanic resources is sustainable”. These definitions essentially introduced the multi-dimensional concept of sustainable development (World Bank and UNDESA, 2017) to the economic concept of an ocean economy, similar in a number of ways to the older concept of a Green Economy. This is the essential feature of the Blue Economy concept often used today: an objective to balance both the economic opportunities and environmental limitations of using the ocean to generate wealth, in what is both a “bold vision and an excruciatingly delicate balancing act” (Colgan, 2017).

Creating a Blue Economy

As the term Blue Economy has increasingly been used to reflect the sustainability of an ocean economy, some organisations have emphasised its social dimensions (Patil et al., 2018). FAO for example included “social protection of coastal communities” in its description of the concept (FAO, 2014). Given that the largest source of employment in the ocean economy is likely to be small-scale fisheries, experts have recently cautioned that the concerns of these communities and stakeholders are at risk of being forgotten or ignored in the pursuit of a Blue Economy, particularly as their activities are often informal and harder to count than many ocean industries (Basurto et al., 2017; World Bank, 2012; Cohen et al., 2019).

If the Blue Economy concept is defined essentially as the pursuit or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Blue Economy as a global initiative
• 2 Blue Economy opportunities and challenges for the Wider Caribbean
• 3 The Blue Economy winners and losers in the Wider Caribbean
• 4 The state of marine ecosystems that support Blue Economies in the Wider Caribbean
• 5 Implications of climate change for Blue Economies in the Wider Caribbean
• 6 The role of coastal and marine planning in achieving Blue Economies
• 7 Valuation of ecosystem services as a basis for investment in Blue Economies
• 8 National ocean governance as a foundation for Blue Economic development
• 9 Regional ocean governance: An imperative for addressing Blue Economy challenges and opportunities in the Wider Caribbean
• 10 Fisheries as a key component of Blue Economies in the Wider Caribbean
• 11 Tourism in the Caribbean and the Blue Economy: Can the two be aligned?
• 12 The role of shipping and marine transport in developing Blue Economies
• 13 Renewable energy: An emerging Blue Economy sector
• 14 Is there a future for the oil and gas sector within the Caribbean’s Blue Economy?
• 15 The future of deep-seabed minerals and marine genetic resources in Blue Economies
• 16 The role of waste management in underpinning the Blue Economy
• 17 Financing the Blue Economy in the Wider Caribbean
• 18 Limits and opportunities in supporting the Blue Economy: A diplomat’s view
• 19 The Blue Economy in the Wider Caribbean: Opportunities, limitations and considerations
• Index