Feasibility study on an observatory for the blue economy and the sea satellite accounts for the European Union : final report

The Blue Economy comprises all those activities that are marine based or marine-related. It consists of sectors that have been a salient part of the Blue Economy for many years (e.g. Fisheries and aquaculture, Maritime transport) and sectors that have more recently gained prominence, either due to their accelerated growth (Off-shore wind energy) or due to their importance towards sustainability (Bio-Economy, Ecosystem services). The growth of the Blue Economy sectors brings new opportunities for investment and hold huge potential for the future development of coastal communities. The established sectors are already monitored quite extensively through data sources such as the European System of Statistics, Fisheries and aquaculture data (under the EU Data Collection Framework), Eurostat data from Structural Business Statistics (SBS), PRODCOM, National Accounts and tourism statistics. Overall, they directly employed over four million people and generated €658 billion of turnover and €180 billion of gross value added in 2017. The emerging sectors, on the other hand, have limited data availability in publicly available data sources with majority of data being dispersed over multiple smaller data collection initiatives and services. Gradually, more data is becoming available so that an attempt is being made to find comparable and consistent ways of monitoring and measuring these sectors. The main objective of this study is to assess the feasibility of an observatory on the Blue Economy and a Sea Satellite Account (SSA). The study enables a comprehensive and integrated approach to measuring the impacts of the Blue Economy, expanding the sources currently in existence with complementary sources. To conduct the feasibility assessment, four tasks were performed over the course of the study: identification of Blue Economy sectors and database; data collection for selected case study countries; feasibility analysis observatory of the Blue Economy; feasibility analysis National/ EU Sea Satellite Accounts.