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The global economy depends on the sustainable use of oceans. Transparency is key

The ocean industry increasingly competes on green operations, customer trust, and non-financial costs. Companies should therefore use data sharing to their competitive advantage. The very fact a company is transparent will drive change and increase efficiency. If a captain or operator knows that he or she is monitored and evaluated there is automatically an incentive to improve. No one wants to end up at the bottom end of a list, whether ranked against colleagues within the company or benchmarked across the industry. Rather, the positive consequences of making the right choices will indirectly increase market share and thus financial gain for the company and its owners.

By openly sharing data and being transparent about their operations, the industry will, to a greater extent, be able to truly adapt to policy, see a larger degree of self-regulation, and also open up for better interaction and higher trust between industry and society.


Also read: There are up to 14 million tonnes of microplastics on the seafloor — worse than we thought


Sharing ocean data is the key to transparency

To ensure both sustainable and correct reporting are linked to the actual conditions of the economic activity, reporting should be as quantitative and standardized as possible, based on recognized metrics, tools, and policies. Access to such quantified data on ocean use and impact is central to a larger movement known as the democratization of data.

Companies’ management, owners, authorities, and society in general should be able to receive regular (ideally daily) updates on how operations are conducted. All data that can provide information on the extent to which economic activities affect the ocean should in principle be made available for use in reporting. Only then will one be able to understand the actual effect on the sea from individual companies, both by examining the data directly and by also enabling broader scientific research and deeper understanding of the operational effect that companies have on ocean health.

To achieve a transparent and sustainable blue economy, we need to:

  • Develop tools, policies, and legal frameworks to standardize data sharing for ocean industries.
  • Link this data with other relevant ocean data for deeper insight and understanding of impact.
  • Develop automated reporting tools that permit the collection and analysis of this operational data in a concise and consistent way enabling owners, customers, and society to influence a sustainable exploitation of the ocean.

The C4IR Ocean is taking an active role in all of these three actions, and we hereby invite the ocean community to join us as partners for working towards ocean sustainability. We are building the Ocean Data Platform as an open platform to share, visualize, and use ocean data. We are also together with Microsoft leading the Ocean Data Action Coalition of the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy and developing legal guidelines for how to share ocean data with our partner BAHR.

Though we all rely on the ocean we cannot drive change in an information vacuum.

This article was originally published in the World Economic Forum.


Also read: World’s oceans may seem unimportant, but letting it die isn’t an option


 

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