Blue Economy

The blue economy applies the landscape approach to the sea: one coastal system, planned spatially and negotiated among the parties who use it, rather than a set of separate permits for fishing, aquaculture, tourism and conservation.

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands with the second-longest coastline in the world, and the economy that sits on it is largely informal: small-scale fisheries, seaweed farms, salt ponds, coastal tourism. That economy is also the country’s first line of defence against the climate crisis. Mangroves and coastal vegetation absorb storm surge and hold sediment; healthy reefs and seagrass sustain the fisheries; peat and coastal forest store carbon at densities land ecosystems rarely reach.

The tension is the familiar one. Conversion of mangrove to pond or plantation raises short-term income and removes the protection the same community depends on; expanding aquaculture without water-quality management degrades the resource it needs. Balancing that trade-off requires a spatial plan for the seascape, an institution that can hold the parties to it, and a financing structure that pays for protection as reliably as production pays for itself.

The program works on all three: the analysis and roadmap, the governance arrangement, and the blend of public, concessional and commercial capital — including carbon and ecosystem service revenue where the measurement supports it.

Both are cases where the protective and the productive use of a coastal landscape point in the same direction rather than against each other.

Seaweed is grown in the water column without inputs, so scaling it does not require converting land or clearing mangrove — and it improves water quality as it grows. For coastal households it is one of the few activities that raises income without raising pressure on the resource. The constraint is downstream: post-harvest handling, processing, and an offtake structure that rewards quality rather than volume alone.

Mangrove restoration and protection carry the reverse profile — high public value, weak private return. The storm protection, fisheries nursery and carbon storage a standing mangrove provides accrue to the community and the state, not to the licence-holder who could convert it. That is precisely the gap carbon and ecosystem service finance can close, provided the measurement is credible and the revenue reaches the people who forgo the conversion.

Taken together they give a coastal landscape two revenue lines that reinforce its own resilience. Designing that combination, site by site, is the program’s work.