The Re-Valuing Blue Natural Capital initiative aims to accelerate the protection and restoration of the ocean for the benefit of current and future generations, as well as all life on Earth. The initiative seeks to achieve this by showing how the ocean’s ‘blue’ natural capital can be embedded within global economic, financial and legal systems to support its sustainable governance and management.
Blue natural capital encompasses the nature-made renewable and non-renewable resources and services in marine and coastal ecosystem types, including coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, open ocean, biomass and biodiversity in the water column and deep-sea systems. Ecosystem goods and services, biotic and abiotic, flow from these natural resource stocks (e.g. food provision, carbon sequestration, coastal protection, nutrient cycling) ultimately supporting the economy, human livelihoods, and cultural identities.
The initiative’s ultimate ambition is to contribute to a future in which the importance of blue natural capital is impossible to ignore, in which degrading it carries real and recognised consequences, and in which maintaining and restoring it is systematically rewarded.
