Planet ‘Earth’ is mislabelled. Our planet is primarily blue, not green (or brown), and the ocean is a critical element in planetary health. But over the past 20 years there has been an increase in industrial activity in the ocean space, often dubbed the ‘blue acceleration’. Where once there were thousands of miles of blue, with not a person (or a boat) to be seen, now there are cruise liners, oil and gas rigs, tankers and transporters. Sectors that operate in the ocean include cruise tourism; marine equipment and construction; offshore oil and gas; offshore wind; port activities; seafood; shipbuilding and repair; and container shipping. The blue economy employs tens of millions of people. Its value is more than $1tn. While some of these activities may appear distant to everyday life, as consumers we are linked to these sectors when we use energy, eat seafood, or buy goods that are sourced from outside the country we live in – especially when we live in an island nation like the UK. If you take a ferry, visit the fish and chip shop, switch on your kettle, you are involved. The uniquely challenging aspect of these ocean sector activities is that they are relatively unobservable to us. Much of the corporate action takes place in distant ‘out of sight’ locations, and sometimes in places where there is no state- based governance (that is, on the high seas). This makes understanding these sectors and their impacts more difficult, but equally critical for wider ecosystem health. SHINING A LIGHT Research from our team here at Lancaster University Management School, along with ocean experts at the Duke, Stanford and Stockholm universities, as well as the European University Institute, has illuminated the ecological impacts of these various sectors. We have also evaluated the extent to which reporting by corporations in these sectors addresses the impacts identified. Firstly, the ecological impacts that arise in each sector cover nine kinds of impact, namely: 1. Climate change effects arising from energy use; 2. Oil spills and gas leaks; 3. Pollution effects (including wastes and rubbish); 4. End-of-life effects, especially for ship demolition and the end-of-life of fossil fuel assets; 5. Noise effects (which are especially impactful on marine mammals); 6. Alteration of habitats; 7. Removal of biomass (through fishing, farming or dredging); 8. Introduction of non-native species (for example, carried in ballast water discharges); 9. Collision with fauna (especially along migration routes). Secondly, our research identified a cohort of companies made up of the ten largest firms in each of the eight sectors for us to analyse. We focused only on their ocean-related revenue: companies in oil and gas, for example, have land-based and ocean-based activities, the latter of which was within our scope. This is a ‘keystone actor’ approach, whereby it is proposed that the largest companies in a sector might be the ones that shape the behaviour of others in their sector. The third step, was to review sustainability or annual financial reports of these 80 companies. Of these companies, 64 had sustainability reports, 11 had annual financial reports only, and five had no reports at all. 40 |
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