Oceans Are the World’s 7th Largest Economy

The oceans are vitally important to the earth and humanity, more so than we can even imagine. Oceans directly impact the lives of everyone on this earth, regardless of whether they live on a coast or not. A new report from the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) is trying to make people realize just how important the oceans are by estimating how much money they’re worth and what makes up that value both to humans and economies. Hopefully, this new report will help people realize just what’s at stake as our oceans get closer and closer to changing irreversibly for the worse.

The World Wildlife Fund has deduced that the total asset value of our oceans equate to $24 trillion while the annual goods and services they provide come out to around $2.5 trillion. Even though these numbers seem high, they could and should be much higher. The report doesn’t take things such as oil or wind power into account, as well as more intangible things like climate regulation. If you were to factor those in, the number would only soar higher. The current value comes from things such as fisheries, tourism, shipping lanes, and coastal protection provided by mangroves and reefs against things like massive waves. However even though the ocean’s economy seems robust, it’s in danger of crashing as the world continues to over-exploit and destroy our natural resources. Already 2/3 of the world’s fisheries have reached “full exploitation” while most of the remaining ones are being over-exploited. Biological diversity is plummeting and the world’s reefs and seagrass are disappearing before our very eyes.

The goal of this report is to help the business community (as they are usually the ones harming our oceans) to understand just how important the oceans are and why they need to be preserved. Key aspects of the ocean’s economy such as fisheries and tourism are going to be completely ruined as ocean acidification continues. With reefs dead and disappearing, people in coastal communities will be in that much more danger of rising tides and waves. None of this is even taking into account what will happen as fish stocks begin to die out, pushing people inland as they search for new sources of food and putting strain on existing infrastructures that might not be able to handle the influx of hungry people. Food prices will go up and there will be even more of a protein squeeze then there already is. Hopefully this report will help people realize just what is at stake when scientists are warning about the dangers of climate change.

If you’d like to read more, the link is here.

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