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.