The Blue Economy is an emerging focus area for sustainable development in many countries, with many countries having more marine area than terrestrial area under their jurisdiction. There are a range of development opportunities in sustainable fisheries/ aquaculture, addressing marine pollution, resilient seascape management, and rethinking oceanic sectors that can help developing countries with their growth and poverty alleviation goals. Additional development opportunities that can improve the environment and livelihoods in developing countries through the Blue Economy can also be leveraged through pursuing solutions for sustainability and governance challenges, including marine pollution (e.g., plastics/microplastics), climate risks exacerbated by climate change (e.g., sea level rise, coastal storms and flooding), coastal erosion, and inadequate information, institutional, and infrastructure capacity and frameworks to manage these issues effectively.

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 technologies to scale up the positive impact and manage risks associated with the Blue Economy. Examples of BlueTech 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 even undersea agriculture. Some of these BlueTech examples are disrupting the Blue Economy by doing things differently (faster, cheaper, more sustainably) and others are disrupting by giving us 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 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 as well. The ability of BlueTech to help developing countries more sustainably and effectively leverage their marine resources is especially important in light of the recent Covid-19 pandemic. BlueTech can help address several of the social, economic, and environmental implications of the pandemic by moving countries along a better trajectory of harnessing their marine resources for social and economic development, but to do so in a way that simultaneously protects and restores marine habitats.

There is a strong need - especially in the developing world - to learn from emerging global good practices and risk management measures in a 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 effort has included developing this interactive resource book (with an associated data catalog, knowledge explorer, and recorded webinars) to help users learn at their own pace and be a “live” resource with additional innovations e-packaged over time. This resource book is a summary version built from an associated lengthier e-book (available here ) that was used as the basis for a BlueTech Virtual Knowledge Exchange held in May 2022 through the OLC. The Virtual Knowledge Exchange featured a series of webinars on BlueTech and data value chains and BlueTech innovations and applications. Recordings of the webinars can be found here .

Please send in your comments and suggestions to improve these resources and add new content to our Disruptive Knowledge, Information, and Data Services (KIDS) Helpdesk at Disruptive_KIDS_Helpdesk@worldbank.org.

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