🌊  BLUE GROWTH TOPICS FROM THE MISTRAL BLUE BOOK

Today, Blue Growth is recognised to be an economic opportunity, source of jobs and driver of sustainable development for Europe.

The EU Blue Growth strategy defines and supports actions and frameworks in order to unlock the potential of seas and oceans and, to address this big challenge, a number of initiatives have been already launched across Europe. According to the Annual Economic Report of Blue Economy (EC, 2019), Mediterranean states account for four of the five largest shares in the blue economy.

Nevertheless, the overall potential of Mediterranean Sea could be better exploited in terms of blue growth and jobs. The lack of homogeneity and a poorly managed overall use of diverse and numerous resources - starting from local biodiversity, tourism, renewable energy production, and so on - represent a major limit to guarantee the long-term capacity to sustain such economic activities. This challenge can only be faced by developing a common and shared vision that includes all MED Countries for a sustainable use of sea resources.

The MISTRAL Blue Book aims to assess challenges and opportunities within the Blue Growth sector looking at innovation driven actions in order to deliver the highest impact a thus open opportunities for stakeholders.

The Blue Growth scenario at the Mediterranean level is here described by looking at the most expanding sectors in the recent years and to those emerging sectors considered to be the more promising in the future:

•  Marine Renewable Energy (MRE)
•  Fishing & Aquaculture (F&A) 
• Maritime Surveillance (MS) 
• Blue Biotechnologies (BB) 
• Coastal and Maritime Tourism (C&MT). 

The book includes a general overview of Blue Growth size and trends around the Mediterranean Sea, followed by an in-depth analysis by sector assessing the current status and opportunities by integrating data from Albania, Cyprus, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal (Countries part of the MISTRAL Interreg MED project). The Blue Book gives a cross-sectorial analysis of the entire assessment by highlighting potential synergies among sectors and trying to align enabling factors in order to obtain reference for stakeholders who intend to exploit or invest in the Mediterranean’s Blue Economy.