Highlights
- As most measures of ocean health continue to decline, we must move beyond sustainability and build a blue economy that regenerates.
- Regenerative approaches ensure thriving ecosystems translate into resilient markets and communities.
- A regenerative blue economy channels investment and policy support towards sectors that deliver these outcomes and gradually phases out those that cannot.
As most measures of ocean health continue to decline, it's imperative that we move beyond sustainability and build an ocean economy that regenerates. Every major sector that depends on the sea fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, tourism, energy, biotechnology faces the same test: can it evolve in ways that make ocean recovery the foundation of long-term business success?
Regeneration is not an abstract goal; it is the practical recognition that maintaining a degraded ocean undermines economic prospects and human well-being. Regenerative approaches align ecological recovery with long-term profitability and social prosperity, ensuring thriving ecosystems translate into resilient markets and communities.
The question is not whether ocean industries will continue to grow, but how that growth can be reimagined within planetary boundaries to support shared prosperity. A regenerative blue economy measures success by recovery and value enhancement: reefs that rebuild, fisheries that rebound, coasts that protect livelihoods and communities that thrive. The challenge is to make those outcomes the norm, not the exception.
Shifting from extraction to regeneration
For decades, the blue economy was defined by growth in industrial metrics: cargo tonnage, fish landings, installed energy capacity and visitor arrivals. Regeneration asks whether activity across these sectors collectively enhances the ocean's capacity to sustain life. Some sectors are nearing their ecological limits, others have room to expand under stronger safeguards and new ones are emerging around restoration and data.
Wild-capture fisheries remain near 90 million tonnes a year, effectively flat for a decade. Aquaculture surpassed wild catch in 2022 for the first time at 94.4 million tonnes, reflecting a structural shift in supply. The future of capture fisheries lies not in increased extraction, but in rebuilding stocks, restoring habitats and securing small-scale fishers' rights. Shipping, which carries more than 80% of global trade by volume and emits about 2% of global greenhouse gases, is similarly re-evaluating its trajectory under the International Maritime Organization's net-zero-by-2050 strategy. Progress will depend on cleaner fuels, new designs and consistent regulations that reward verified emissions reductions.
Offshore renewables are expanding rapidly, with global installed offshore wind capacity reaching 83 gigawatts in 2024 more than triple the capacity of a decade ago and projected to reach 2000 gigawatts by 2050. This sector demonstrates how growth and regeneration can converge: by delivering low-carbon energy, creating coastal jobs and, when responsibly sited, supporting marine habitat restoration and co-use with fisheries.
