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Sustainability
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Canada's Blue Economy: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable Marine Development
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Canada's Blue Economy: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable Marine Development

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (26 March 2023) | Viewed by 7145

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Gerald G. Singh

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Social Science, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada
Interests: sustainable development; uncertainty; cumulative impacts; expert elicitation; coastal management; conservation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Canada has recently announced plans for a Blue Economy strategy, and as a major coastal nation (coastlines on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans) with significant international fishing and resource extraction fleets, Canada's plans will have important implications for global sustainability while also setting a precedent for other countries. Canada historically has a number of important ocean-based industries and has interest in developing capacity in other emerging ones, both domestically and abroad.

Interest in a Blue Economy has also been heightened through a strategic lens of post-COVID-19 economic recovery. However, the promise of a "Blue Economy" is one that goes beyond purely economic interests and includes interests in delivering large-scale environmental protection alongside economic growth, revitalizing coastal communities, and development planning with Indigenous knowledge and concerns considered. Any Blue Economy plan will need to consider other national-level priorities, including Canada's commitments to climate change action, contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals and global biodiversity agreements, Indigenous reconciliation and justice, and policy development through an intersectional lens. For this Special Issue, we seek submissions relating to any one (or more) of these topics and considerations of whether all goals can be addressed at once.

Dr. Gerald G. Singh
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Blue Economy
  • sustainable development
  • marine conservation
  • equitable development
  • climate change
  • Indigenous knowledge
  • fisheries
  • aquaculture
  • marine energy
  • tourism
  • blue carbon
  • bioprospecting
  • ocean industries

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 913 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Economic Contribution of Ocean-Based Activities Using the Pacific Coast of British Columbia as a Case Study
by Lydia C. L. Teh, William W. L. Cheung and Rashid Sumaila
Sustainability 2022, 14(14), 8662; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14148662 - 15 Jul 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3015
Abstract
Global obligations to achieve sustainable oceans by 2030 require countries to commit to solutions that balance ocean use and protection. To do so necessitates baseline understanding of the ocean’s contribution to socio-economic well-being, which we do by measuring the economic activity of ocean-related [...] Read more.
Global obligations to achieve sustainable oceans by 2030 require countries to commit to solutions that balance ocean use and protection. To do so necessitates baseline understanding of the ocean’s contribution to socio-economic well-being, which we do by measuring the economic activity of ocean-related sectors. Economic assessments tend to be data intensive and are typically reliant on professional economists, yet they are increasingly relevant to non-economists who engage in ocean management and communication, where they are integral in facilitating trade-off analysis of future ocean change. Thus, there is a need to make ocean economic assessment more accessible to nonspecialists. We fill this need by providing a pragmatic framework for conducting an economic assessment using British Columbia’s ocean sector as a case study. Our results show the impact of the province’s ocean sectors on four economic indicators and indicate that the ocean contributed almost $5 billion (or about 2%) to provincial gross domestic product (GDP) and generated about 106,120 jobs (over 4% of the province’s total) in 2015. Of these, the marine transport sector made the highest overall contribution followed by cruise lines, with GDP impacts of 66% and 13%, respectively. It should be noted that this estimated economic value is not representative of the full value of the ocean as it excludes oil and gas, research and education, and other activities that do not meet our criteria for inclusion, and it does not account for cultural and ecological values. Nonetheless the study highlights the substantial number of economic benefits generated by the blue economy. More significantly, the framework provides a simplified procedure for quantifying economic benefits, and can be applied by nonspecialists to perform rapid economic assessments in a variety of contexts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Canada's Blue Economy: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable Marine Development)
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17 pages, 747 KiB  
Article
Oil, Transitions, and the Blue Economy in Canada
by Leah M. Fusco, Marleen S. Schutter and Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor
Sustainability 2022, 14(13), 8132; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14138132 - 3 Jul 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2891
Abstract
Decisions about whether to include oil in blue economy plans can be controversial but also fundamental to the ability of these plans to transform (or not) business-as-usual in the oceans. This paper examines (a) how oil is sometimes included and justified in blue [...] Read more.
Decisions about whether to include oil in blue economy plans can be controversial but also fundamental to the ability of these plans to transform (or not) business-as-usual in the oceans. This paper examines (a) how oil is sometimes included and justified in blue economy planning when its development is at odds with climate commitments and the need for just transitions away from fossil fuels, and (b) how oil could be included in blue economy planning, or transitions to blue economies and just energy transitions away from oil. We examine how tensions between sustainability/climate commitments and oil development impacts are resolved in practice, specifically by analyzing a particular approach to the blue economy that focuses on technology and innovation. The overlap of oil with renewable energy, specifically through technology, has become an important part of recent ocean and blue economy narratives in oil-producing nations and illustrates the contradictions inherent in ocean development discourse. We draw specifically on the case of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), the only province in Canada with a mature offshore oil industry and thus the region most potentially impacted by decisions about whether to include oil in Canada’s blue economy. We argue that the blue economy approach to ocean governance being enacted in NL is currently being used as a form of legitimation for continuing the development of oil with no real transition plan away from it. Furthermore, we argue that blue economy plans must not only envision transitions to renewables but also explicitly and actively transitions away from oil to minimize environmental and social justice and equity issues at multiple scales. We end by highlighting some necessary conditions for how ocean economies that include oil can transition to sustainable and equitable blue economies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Canada's Blue Economy: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable Marine Development)
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