The blue economy encompasses aquatic environment activities, from traditional community development initiatives like fishing to emerging industries such as renewable ocean energies and marine biotechnology.
The blue economy reflects a growing recognition of the ocean’s critical role in economic growth, environmental protection, and social progress as well as food security and women and gender issues.
EnviroStrat is the lead consultant on a National Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) Framework and two pilot MSPs at local Government level in The Philippines, integrating the archipelago’s fisheries with a broader blue economy assessment with fisherfolk at its heart. Some 2.15 million people are employed in the ocean economy, where fisheries and aquaculture contributed US$2.37 billion (1.5% of GDP) in 2016, and employed a large majority of small-scale fisherfolk that sustain households on the coast. For the past decade, marine fishery catches averaged 2 million tonnes per year (topped by exports of tuna followed by seaweeds and crabs). But fishing,…
From our EnviroStrat Explainer series, we talk about Blue Carbon. Q – What is blue carbon? A - Blue carbon is the carbon sequestered in coastal and marine ecosystems. These ecosystems commonly include mangroves, seagrass beds, and salt marshes. You may have heard about soil storing carbon, and blue carbon is the coastal and oceanic equivalent of this. Q – What work has EnviroStrat been doing in this area? A - Among our clients are The World Bank. The World Bank's first-of-its-kind blue carbon readiness framework empowers governments to tap into their full blue carbon potential to benefit people and…
Turning possibility into practice has shaped everything we do. Much of our focus has been on activating
new revenue streams and attracting investment to deal with large and often seemingly unsolvable
environmental challenges.
We are grateful for our advisory clients and the investors and collaborators in our impact ventures
returning and new – for trusting us to design and deploy approaches that value ecosystem services, co
design interventions for freshwater, ocean, and land-based ecosystems, and grounded approaches to
adaptation and resilience, risk mitigation, and regeneration.
Aquaculture expansion across ASEAN is full of opportunity, but “where to grow” is the make-or-break question for sustainability, livelihoods, and investment confidence. The World Bank has commissioned EnviroStrat to undertake a study that will support the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Department of Aquaculture Development (DAD) within the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries with planning decisions regarding suitable locations for the sustainable expansion of freshwater aquaculture. The project will produce a set of clear maps showing where freshwater aquaculture is most likely to work well — and where it isn’t using GIS and Multi Criteria Analysis. These maps…
When we talk about ocean health, we’re talking about community livelihoods and their reliance marine ecosystems that can meet their needs into the future. In the Philippines, this connection is profound. As an archipelago country, Philippines is one of the most megadiverse places on Earth, home to an estimated 70-80% of global plant and animal species. With more than 2.5 million registered fisherfolk, the archipelago nation depends on the sea for daily income, food security and cultural identity. But marine space is not empty space, it is shared space. Fishing, aquaculture, tourism, shipping, offshore wind, conservation and tourism areas provide…
For years, the scallop shell has been a symbol of Kiwi summers – its meat golden-seared on a barbecue, skewered at a bach, or piled high at Whitianga’s famous Scallop Festival. But beneath the nostalgia lies something far less celebratory: New Zealand’s wild scallop populations have collapsed, their once-abundant beds dredged, degraded and, in many cases, destroyed. Much of what we believed about scallops, from spawning behaviour to habitat preferences, is incomplete, borrowed from work overseas, or only partially tested in New Zealand conditions. “We’ve taken a species we barely understood,” says Dr Jenny Hillman - a marine scientist at University of Auckland, “dredged it…
By Laura Read EnviroStrat Geospatial Analyst EnviroStrat is combining geospatial analysis, Earth Observation (EO) and impact ventures to accelerate restoration of New Zealand’s coastal ecosystems. Since joining EnviroStrat in 2023, I’ve been building our GIS and Earth Observation capability to better understand and support our impact ventures aimed at regenerating our natural environments. The ORA Reefs project has initially been focused on clearing kina barrens, a symptom of the overfishing of their key predators and global warming. This phenomenon is not just seen in Aotearoa but globally. Once healthy, thriving kelp forests are reduced to barren areas by sea urchin…
Natasha Jacobs gives us the Week One COP update It’s been a big week for Belem, host city for COP30. Delegations from 194 countries, activists, and over 4000 members of the media have descended on the ‘capital of the Amazon’ to discuss global action on climate change. The US made a historic no-show for the first time in COP history. New Zealand has a total of 79 registered attendees, Australia 494 and the UK 210. The big-ticket item, and a central point of discussion this week has been the Baku to Belem roadmap, a paper that aims to outline how climate finance could be scaled up…
Photo: Jeremy Bishop/Unsplash By Natasha Jacobs COP30 is less than a week away, and as always, a lot is already at stake. COP stands for Conference of Parties and is a global summit for partis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to assess progress towards action on climate change. Specifically, the COP is also a space to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding treaty for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the Paris Agreement, which aims to reduce global temperatures to ‘well below 2 °C’. This year is the conference’s…
Fresh from the ANZSA Seaweed Summit 2025, Huna Hough talks us through some of the highlights for this year’s themed event: From Niche to Noticed: Building the Value Chain for our Seaweed Economy. Huna: I attended the ANZSA Seaweed Summit with the rest of the Greenwave Aotearoa team, and being new to the seaweed space, it was great to meet the people behind much of the work I’ve followed and researched over the past year. I also met others doing exciting projects I hadn’t yet discovered. There were many highlights from the day, but I particularly enjoyed hearing Dan Crossett…
