Blue Economy and Tourism: Is There a Potential to Create Sustainable Jobs?

Introduction

Humans have sought coastal areas since a long time ago and several activities have been developed according to the needs of humankind. The interest for the ocean, however, is more recent, probably because of advances in technology that can be used in deeper waters further offshore, namely drilling to obtain fossil fuels (e.g. Rajan, 2011) or by exploring new forms of producing renewable energy (e.g. O’Hagan, 2015), extracting metals from the deep (Salomidi et al., 2012) and deeper fisheries (Cartes et al., 2017). Altogether those activities can potentially provide an immense panoply of jobs (Wei et al., 2010) and economic growth, particularly in coastal regions.

As a result of these developments and increasing debates on climate change and the ocean’s role in mitigating its impacts, there is a growing awareness to ensure sustainable use of ocean resources. However, given the technology developments and the wider interest by countries in developing the blue economy, there is also a growing number of activities related to sea resources and more and more people pursuing ocean-related careers and deriving human benefit from the sea (Bebianno et al., 2018). In the last decades, the ocean and sea have provided an increasing number of maritime-related job opportunities (goods and services on seafood, shipping, fishing, etc.) (Guest et al., 2015). With the increasing number of people engaging in tourism activities in their leisure time, probably the largest share of such jobs are related to maritime/coastal/oceanic tourism and the enormous range of activities on offer (e.g. health, cultural, creative, to name just a few). The adequate management of ocean resources imposed by a modern society continues to thrive and encourages the generation of more jobs (Olsen et al., 2016). Thus, some alternatives are sought for the activities that are less sustainable, and reconversion of jobs are aligned to that (Spagnalo, 2004). Another alternative to the reconversion of jobs is co-creation in tourism, which can add value to traditional activities in coastal areas, such as is the case of the salt pans. These activities can also provide recreational and wellbeing outdoor services (Jakulin and Cop, 2017; Ramos and Campos, 2020).

With the awareness of climate change there is an increasing interest in blue economy in trying to view the ocean not only to preserve its renewable resources (e.g. fish), but also as a potential realm for developing activities with the use of new or improved technologies for ocean observation at a low cost (e.g. internet of things to control sensors of temperature remotely) (Wright and Chan, 2016).

Sometimes trade-offs need to be found. For instance, a given country sought for summer tourism, which has already invested much in tourism infrastructures, should not reverse the decision and start to develop fossil fuels exploitation (Cadarso et al., 2016). The contrary does not also seem reasonable, that is, a given country who already has some fossil fuels exploitation should not decide to invest in tourism infrastructure nearby (Michalena et al., 2009). Of course, all is dependent on the dimension of the country and the distance between activities. Despite the fact that fossil fuels are utilised in every human activity, their exploitation is not possible in many places. On the contrary, the potential for tourism is always available and with the improvement of the fourth industrial revolution technologies, such potential can be explored in many ways, as well as renewable energy (Tang et al., 2011).

The objective of this book chapter is to highlight the potential for blue growth (economy and governance) in developing and encouraging employment in the coastal, marine, maritime and oceanic realm. We describe and discuss the established sectors, as well as the emerging ones, to demonstrate the potential of the blue economy to create sustainable jobs. Particular attention is given to the tourism sector and sustainability of jobs.