National Accounting for the Ocean and Ocean Economy
Realising the goal of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel) to catalyse the transition to a sustainable ocean economy depends on coordinating and managing humanity’s relationship with the ocean and the broader environment. This task requires organising information that currently is often disorganised, spread across multiple government agencies or in a few cases not yet available. National ocean accounts would provide countries with the information needed to guide ambitious and broad- based plans to develop ocean economies and to capitalise on marine opportunities (European Union Directorate-General of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries and Joint Research Centre 2018; Economist Intelligence Unit 2015), while protecting the ocean for generations to come in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals, most notably SDG 14, ‘Life below Water’. The ‘blue-ing’ of the ocean economy—or making the ocean economy sustainable—requires ensuring that the ocean continues to provide at least the current levels of opportunity; ‘measuring the ocean economy gives a country a first-order understanding of the economic importance of the seas’ (Economist Intelligence Unit 2015). The old adage goes that ‘what gets measured, gets managed’, or more accurately, that ‘if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it’. Sound decision- making requires organised information.
