Making the Blue Economy Sustainable: Law, Finance and Marine Protected Areas

The Blue Economy has become a familiar concept in public policy and investment, yet its legal perimeter remains unstable. A functional approach may define it as economic activities having a sufficiently established material or functional connection with an aquatic environment or resource. This includes activities exploiting aquatic resources, using marine or freshwater environments as a determining condition of their operation, or providing goods and services specifically intended for such activities¹. But being “blue” does not make an activity sustainable.

Sustainability adds a normative requirement. Frameworks such as the EU Taxonomy and blue-finance standards increasingly condition access to capital on environmental criteria that must  be identifiable and verifiable². Yet compliance and legal designation do not necessarily establish effective protection. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) expose this gap particularly clearly.

An MPA may have legal boundaries and conservation objectives while lacking the  management, enforcement, financing or community support needed to produce meaningful protection: a “paper park.” Approximately 4.8% of the world’s ocean is actively managed and less than 3% is fully off-limits to commercial activity³. Effective protection requires management plans,trained staff, surveillance, scientific monitoring, enforcement and meaningful community participation. Local communities are particularly important: restrictions may directly affect access to resources and livelihoods, while the benefits of conservation may accrue elsewhere. Their involvement can therefore influence whether protection is understood, accepted and sustained over time⁴. These are recurrent costs, not expenses limited to designation. Global annual needs for effective ocean protection have been estimated at US$15.8 billion, against approximately US$1.2 billion currently spent⁵.

Protection should not, however, be understood solely as a cost imposed on economic activity. Healthy ecosystems sustain fisheries, tourism, livelihoods and other productive capacities. In Brazil’s Abrolhos Marine Park, benefits associated with protection have been estimated at approximately six times the investment, while each additional tourist dollar generated about  US$1.74 in local income⁶. Such valuation does not reduce nature to a financial asset; it shows that environmental degradation can itself generate economic losses.

Law and finance therefore meet at the point where sustainability commitments must become operational. Lawyers structure authorizations, concessions, environmental obligations, financing conditions, reporting duties, risk allocation and accountability mechanisms. For MPAs, financing must similarly extend beyond designation to long-term management and enforcement. Short funding cycles may establish an MPA without securing the resources required to manage it decades later. Sustainable financing therefore depends not only on how much capital is mobilized, but also on whether it remains accessible, predictable and durable⁷.

The challenge of the sustainable Blue Economy is thus not merely to determine which activities may carry a blue or sustainable label. It is to translate environmental objectives into effective, financed and durable structures. Credibility ultimately lies not in the color of the label, but in the reality it produces.

Jhannys KOUADOU
UIA Banking and Financial Services Law Commission

Judy MANN-LANG
Founder of MPA Day

¹ Kamal Azmi, “Shades of Blue: What Do Competing Interpretations of the Blue Economy Mean for Oceans Governance?”, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, vol. 20, no. 5, 2018, pp. 595–616.

² Regulation (EU) 2020/852 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 June 2020, especially Arts. 3, 9, 17 and 18; 2 International Finance Corporation, Guidelines for Blue Finance, Version 2.0, September 2025.

³ Figures reflected in the MPA Day material: approximately 4.8% of the world’s ocean actively managed and less than 3% fully off-limits to commercial activity.

⁴ MPA Day material: local communities are directly affected by MPA restrictions and their participation can influence the social  acceptance, implementation and long-term effectiveness of protection.

⁵ MPA Day material: estimated annual financing needs of approximately US$15.8 billion for effective ocean protection, compared
with approximately US$1.2 billion currently spent.

⁶ Wold Bank assessment cited in the MPA Day material concerning Abrolhos Marine Park, Brazil: estimated benefits of approximately six times the original investment and approximately US$1.74 in additional local income for each additional US dollar spent by tourists.

⁷ MPA Day material: long-term MPA management requires continuing financial resources, while donor funding commonly operates 7 through three-, five- or ten-year cycles that do not necessarily result in financially sustainable management once external support  ends