The Blue Economy is an emerging focus area for sustainable development in many countries given that many countries have more marine area than terrestrial area under their jurisdiction. A range of development opportunities exist in sustainable fisheries/ aquaculture, addressing marine pollution, resilient seascape management, and rethinking oceanic sectors that can help countries with growth and poverty alleviation goals. Leveraging these development opportunities will require addressing sustainability and governance challenges, climate risks exacerbated by climate change (sea level rise, coastal storms, and flooding), and inadequate information, institutional, and infrastructure capacity and frameworks.

Emerging technologies have the capacity to “disrupt” the blue economy by helping countries leapfrog and scale impact when adopted effectively.These include “disruptive technologies” that are already helping rethink informatics for decision support, operational systems, and stakeholder interaction.

“BlueTech” refers to the innovative use of these emerging disruptive technologies to scale up the positive impact and manage risks associated with the Blue Economy. BlueTech can range from the use of earth observation and sensors to improve sustainable fisheries, drones to help plant mangroves, forecasting and early warning systems for coastal storms, robots to clean beaches and floating trash, to floating energy production, autonomous ships, and undersea agriculture. Some of these BlueTech methods could be doing things differently (faster, cheaper, more sustainably) and others providing the ability to do different things that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. This exciting new array of options – ranging from systems already established in-use to those that are still a twinkle in the eyes of startups - have the potential to help us rethink the Blue Economy, not only in the developed world, but to provide a new paradigm of development in many parts of the developing world.

To best leverage BlueTech, there is a strong need to learn from emerging global good practices and risk management measures in the rapidly changing technological environment.The World Bank’s Open Learning Campus (OLC), the Digital Development Global Practice (with its Digital Development Partnership), and the Environment, Natural Resources & Blue Economy Global Practice are helping document and showcase evolving global innovations of interest to this new BlueTech world.

This interactive resource book (with an associated data catalog, knowledge explorer, and recorded webinars) is part of this effort, allowing users to learn at their own pace and serving as a “live” resource with additional innovations e-packaged over time. Comments and suggestions to improve these resources and add new content to our Disruptive Knowledge, Information, and Data Services (KIDS) Helpdesk can be sent to Disruptive_KIDS_Helpdesk@worldbank.org.

Check out a quick preview of these interactive products in the video below