Conclusion
Offshore waters are instrumentally valuable to humans but not indefinitely resilient. Their future will likely play out at the interface between current exploitation trends and societal aspirations. Aiming to overcome the inertia of an undesired business as usual development, we took the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the values they underscore as statements of societal aspirations and identified the actions that may lead to their realisation. The sustainable and equitable offshore Blue Economy we envisaged is achievable, conditional on changes in our governance structures, the way we collaborate, and the extent to which societal values change and are expressed through behaviours. This includes a reconsideration of the purpose of economic activities, which accounts for the need of a growing population, to address rising global inequities and to recognise the essential role of nature for human well-being.
The recent evolution of the COVID-19 global pandemic has further increased uncertainty around future trajectories (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro 2020). We do not yet have the evidence to examine the consequences of such disruption on the offshore Blue Economy, but we can anticipate that some of the aspects discussed in this paper are likely to be affected. Importantly, the global crisis has highlighted inequities and brittleness in some of the flows of the current economic model (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro 2020). Sudden and substantial changes in production and consumption have been disruptive for some ocean sectors (e.g. transport and tourism; Northrop et al. 2020). This disruption has however, provided a global opportunity to discuss alternative economic models that would lead to a more equitable and sustainable direction.
The relevant question now is what blue recovery should look like (Northrop et al. 2020). For the offshore, new opportunities may rise through prioritising recovery of some sectors over others, building on shifts in production that have occurred, or leveraging off competition in the financial marketplace (Northrop et al. 2020; Chiaramonti & Maniatis, 2020). For example, instability following the COVID-19 outbreak has exacerbated an oil price war between suppliers (Chiaramonti & Maniatis, 2020). Oil prices dropped below the threshold of profitability in March-May 2020. While changes in production will help redress this, they may also incentivise investments into the (offshore) renewable energy sector which currently promises more attractive financial returns (Chiaramonti & Maniatis, 2020).
At the close of 2019, it could be readily argued that inertia was likely to lock the offshore Blue Economy into a business as usual future. We could act to make a more sustainable future as palatable as possible, but redirecting the global economic model was highly unlikely. The kind of actions needed had been called for before, for decades, and while progress had been made it was incremental rather than transformative. Midway through 2020 the position is very different, COVID-19 has shaken the globe (e.g. Baldwin & Weder di Mauro 2020; Northrop et al. 2020). The offshore Blue Economy does not automatically need to return to the old business as usual path, it could now more easily redirect to a desirable future.