The ocean plays an important role in every living being. Oceans and seas cover two-thirds of the earth’s surface by providing foods, minerals, generating oxygen, and absorbing. It serves as highways for sea-borne international trade to determine the weather patterns and temperatures. The ocean economy is the sum of economic activities of ocean-based industries, together with all the marine ecosystem’s assets, goods, and services. The marine ecosystem provides intermediate inputs to the ocean-based industries.
Coastal Economic and Social Resilience:
Resilience means insurance products and updating risk in ways that reduce incentives to build or design without risk consideration. The coastal economic and social resilience may include restoring coastal blue carbon sinks, including sea grass, mangroves, and coastal marshes, and making infrastructure like utilities, roads, etc., more resilient. It includes ensuring communication systems, seafloor telecommunication cables, utilities and solid waste management. The investments represent diverse industry and supply chains, generating
ocean economy activity and sustaining economies by making them less vulnerable.
Improving ocean transport:
Under significant pressure of the ocean transport sector is to reduce emissions and increase the sustainability of their operations, including ocean noise, waste streams, and energy efficiency from the port side to the high seas. The economy lens for shipping also offers many kinds of investment opportunities:
- New engineering solutions to develop zero-emission vessels in the market.
- Fuel substitution (electric, dimethyl ether, green hydrogen, ammonia).
- Alternative fuel propulsion systems, for example, computer-aided sails.
- Hull coatings and navigation systems are newly more efficient.
Shipbuilders can reduce the chronic ocean noise with quiet ship technology. Governments can ensure all ports are more sustainable in their energy use, cargo management operations, and waste management.
Ocean renewable energy:
Both expanded R&D and increased production are the kinds of investment, and investors can explore integrated ocean management to balance the needs of other ocean users. The increased ocean noise and other operations on sea life and coastal and island communities are due to the potential effects. The monitoring equipment may represent an investment opportunity. In this sector, investment can be both private and public equity in energy firms, fixed income instruments for public utilities, and in some cases, government bonds for extremely large projects.
Ocean sources food:
The real and urgent ocean-sourced food investment opportunities are sustainable aquaculture and coastal and oceanic fisheries. The sectors in the ocean economy have significant embedded equity and related issues that can be addressed by appropriate investment with a true blue economy lens.
In these sectors, investors can explore opportunities for returns from emissions reductions from fisheries operations, including aquaculture, wild capture and processing, (for example, low-carbon or zero-emission vessels), energy efficiency in postharvest production, (for example, cold storage and ice production), and alternative aquaculture feeds (algae, microbial, fungal, insect). Investors can also analyze new emerging sub-sectors, including new cellular manufactured seafood, kelp farming, and fisheries by product transformation.
Bottom Line:
The major categories of sustainable ocean economy investments are at varying stages and can accommodate public or private investment, debt financing, philanthropy, and other sources of funds.
