A CLIMATE NEUTRAL, SUSTAINABLE AND PRODUCTIVE BLUE ECONOMY

 Никола Бенин

Europe is a maritime continent. At 22 million km2 , the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the European Union (including EU overseas territories) is the largest in the world; twice as large as that of the USA. In 2018, the EU Blue Economy directly employed close to 5 million people, generating more than €750 billion of turnover. The potential of a climate neutral and sustainable Blue Economy to deliver innovation, value creation and employment is high, and its role in addressing global challenges such as energy security, healthy environment, climate change and sustainable food provision is substantial. Seas and oceans also impact on human health and wellbeing in ways we are only beginning to understand3 , meaning that we need to take a wider view on how to foster sustainable and resilient coastal enterprise and communities. The OECD (2016) projected that the value added by ocean industries would double by 2030 relative to 2010 (Fig. 1), based on a scenario that assumes business as usual with respect to trends, policies, technological or environmental developments. The projection does not factor in neither the COVID-19 crisis, nor potential additional value creation from ambitious and transformative change towards a climate neutral, sustainable and productive Blue Economy that is central to the objectives of this Partnership. The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to impact economic growth, employment, societal priorities and political agendas worldwide for a period of several years. This will also affect the Blue Economy, bearing both risk and opportunity. Comprehensive and innovative results from the Partnership may be timely to support the re-establishment of socioeconomic structures in an ecologically and economically more sustainable and resilient way. There is a risk, however, that long-term sustainability could be put on hold to deal with immediate concerns. The Partnership can help intervene here by streamlining public and private development and recovery investments towards reducing risks from critical market failures and underpinning Blue Economy development with data and assessment tools. Considering that the global economy is highly dynamic and other parts of the world also turn to the ocean for economic development, the Partnership may generate solutions with a global appeal.

About 70% of the ocean is experiencing increasing cumulative anthropogenic impacts4 . Reducing the environmental impact of ongoing activities and ensuring that future economic developments do not repeat past mistakes will be central to the vision of this Partnership. To that effect, the ecosystem approach to management (EAM5 ) will be promoted as an integrated, systemic conceptual framework by which the trade-offs between different objectives and interests are identified, understood and managed.

Bottlenecks and market failures A number of bottlenecks and market failures that slow down the development of the Blue Economy and its transition to climate neutral and sustainable practices can be addressed. The R&I landscape is overall fragmented. In the EU, more than 85% of the investments in Research, Development & Innovation are made at national level (Fig. 3). In 2010, EU Member States (MS) agreed to increase their total R&D spending to 3% of GDP by 2020. This has not been achieved, but alignment of public R&I funding can at least maximise the impact of the investments and contribute significantly to the strengthening of a functioning and highperforming European Research Area (ERA) in the Blue Economy domain. 

Policy responsibilities, R&I disciplines and industry sectors8 are often compartmentalised or siloed. This issue is common to all levels: global, EU, regional, national and local. The Report of the independent High-Level Group on maximising the impact of EU Research & Innovation Programmes in 2016 notes that this discourages cooperation across socioeconomic sectors and disciplines, which ultimately prevents provision of knowledge for a “green” development of and transformation to an evidence and knowledge based Blue Economy. Other shortcomings are a lack of harmonised definitions, results and frameworks around ecosystem services, thus limiting their contributions to the valuation of services and measurements of the impacts of interventions. To that effect, a multi-stakeholder Partnership can promote the needed common understanding, culture and language across Blue Economy sectors, disciplines and stakeholders. Sustainable growth and jobs necessitate that results of research on one hand and the potential investors on the other must be bridged, for innovation to come out of the lab and onto the market. Studies have shown that private investors generally lack familiarity with the Blue Economy investment landscape. The Partnership can address this by upscaling and expanding models such as the BlueInvest platform that support investment readiness and access to finance for early-stage businesses, SMEs and scale-ups in the Blue Economy.