Powering the Blue Economy

By Craig Collins

Our nation’s waterfronts, ports, and harbors have historically been centers of rapid industrial and urban growth, and have advanced critical national objectives by promoting energy exploration, fishery production, commerce, and recreation. Maritime transport is one significant part of America’s “Blue Economy,” the benefits derived from perhaps the world’s biggest and most diverse economic frontier: a healthy ocean. Still in its formative stages, America’s Blue Economy includes seafood production, recreation and tourism, ocean exploration, and coastal resilience, and maritime transport alone adds 2.3 million jobs to the U.S. market, provides $373 billion in goods and services, and produces $617 billion in annual sales – far more than agriculture.

NOAA is exceptionally qualified to lead this era of economic growth: As the nation’s leading students and stewards of the ocean, its people recognize the sea as the Earth’s largest life-support system, a resource requiring careful, evidence-based management. As devoted public servants, they have the expertise and competence to connect decision-makers and coastal communities with the data, products, and methods that will help them understand the value of their marine resources and sustainably develop them.

By 2030, the global ocean economy is expected to double in value to $3 trillion, and NOAA has a plan to grow the American Blue Economy – to balance the needs of Americans with the health of the ocean.

American wild-capture fisheries are among the best-managed and most productive in the world. In 2017, U.S. commercial and recreational fisheries generated more than $244 billion in sales and more than $110 billion in additional value, while adding 1.74 million jobs to the market. Since 2000, informed by sound science and innovative management practices, NOAA Fisheries has rebuilt 47 economically valuable fish stocks to sustainable levels, often years or even decades ahead of schedule, while reducing the number of overfished stocks to an alltime low.

The most significant threat to American seafood isn’t the U.S. industry, but the exploitation of its resources by unlicensed or fraudulent interlopers. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in U.S. waters, along with seafood fraud – misrepresenting seafood products to consumers – threaten the health of fish stocks, reduce consumer confidence, and unfairly compete with U.S. fishers who operate lawfully.

In 2018, to ensure fairness for U.S. seafood producers, NOAA Fisheries launched its Seafood Monitoring Import Program, which establishes a chain of custody from where seafood is harvested to its entry in the U.S. market. The program protects the value of both domestic and imported seafood, requiring data on 13 imported fish and fish products identified as vulnerable to illegal fishing and/or seafood fraud.

The world’s per capita seafood consumption has more than doubled since NOAA was founded in 1970. At the same time, its population has nearly doubled as well. Amid this rising demand, the United States is importing more seafood than ever, leading to a significant trade deficit. In 2017, a year in which the United States exported 3.6 billion pounds of seafood, it imported 6 billion pounds.

Wild-capture fisheries cannot sustain this demand. Over the past 30 years, aquaculture – cultivating fin fish, shellfish, and algae – has begun to close the gap, increasing its share of global seafood production from 10 to more than 50 percent. It’s the world’s fastest-growing food sector.

Despite advancements, American aquaculture is in its formative years, accounting for less than 1 percent of global production – but NOAA is leading an effort to expand it, encouraged in part by a May 2020 Executive Order (EO) promoting American seafood competitiveness and growth in federal waters. The EO prioritizes efforts to support the American seafood industry.

The EO seeks more efforts to increase permit efficiencies related to offshore aquaculture and additional streamlining of fishery regulations. “By removing outdated and unnecessarily burdensome regulations; strengthening efforts to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; improving the transparency and efficiency of environmental reviews; and renewing our focus on longterm strategic planning to facilitate aquaculture projects, we can protect our aquatic environments; revitalize our nation’s seafood industry; get more Americans back to work; and put healthy, safe food on our families’ tables.”

NOAA’s effort to establish the scientific knowledge base for sustainable American aquaculture, while reducing regulatory barriers to production, is coordinated by its Office of Aquaculture. According to Danielle Blacklock, who directs this office, the growth of American seafood farming will be built on a solid foundation of science and stewardship. “We already have a strong industry when it comes to shellfish,” she said. Cultivation of algae – including kelp and other seaweeds – has also taken hold in Alaska and Northeastern waters. Fin fish farming in marine waters is currently only done by a handful of companies in the U.S., while in other countries it is a prominent food production system. “As NOAA and our partners provide the research and regulatory efficiencies to move offshore,” Blacklock said, “we will see opportunities for all types of marine aquaculture production to grow significantly.”

Over 95 percent of the cargo entering the United States arrives by ship at American ports. NOAA’s navigation services help support the $5.4 trillion in economic activity and 31 million jobs that rely on these ports, and are developed in collaboration with port operators.

Navigation safety is NOAA’s oldest mission, dating to the 1807 founding of the Survey of the Coast. As today’s Office of the Coast Survey phases out production of its traditional paper nautical charts, it is producing a new generation of navigation services and data packages tailored to the needs of mariners and port operators.

Today’s Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) are updated weekly with critical corrections such as newly discovered shoals, debris, or other navigational hazards. NOAA is in the process of transforming ENCs, whose layouts have been based on the paper charts from which they were originally digitized. The result will be an updated electronic image capable of scrolling continuously along all parts of a vessel’s route, a merging of the 1,200 ENCs covering 95,000 miles of shoreline and 3.6 million square miles within U.S. coastal waters and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

With its new Precision Marine Navigation (PMN) program, NOAA customizes its datasets for individual port environments and packages them at a single online portal. The new PMN site features a map viewer that allows users to explore tides and currents; water depth; the shape of the seafloor and coastline; the location of obstructions or hazards; and other physical features of the port environment from their computer or smartphone. An Application Programming Interface allows shipboard users to integrate this data into onboard systems.

In the summer of 2020, NOAA began issuing surface current forecasts in support of PMN, collected from NOAA-operated systems and automatically processed and uploaded into the NOAA Big Data Program cloud every six hours. These data are now being evaluated among users with different types of navigation software.

Most of a vessel’s transit happens outside of a port. According to NOAA Corps Rear Adm. Shepard Smith, who directs the Office of Coast Survey, NOAA is participating in an effort to optimize long routes. In receiving ports, a vessel’s estimated time of arrival (ETA) is an intricately coordinated event, with schedules involving trains, trucks, labor, and other vessels. The typical way vessels assure their ETA is to speed through the first portion of their voyage, building confidence in an on-time arrival, and then gradually slowing. It’s an inefficient waste of fuel and money, Smith said, and produces more carbon emissions than necessary. “The most efficient speed for a ship to go on a voyage is the slowest constant water speed they can travel to make it there on time.”

The Coast Survey is working with a coalition of international partners, NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center, and the National Ice Center to produce models and provide digital navigation services that will help operators optimize route speeds over long transits. Industry investigations have indicated that optimized routes could reduce fuel consumption – and resulting emissions – by more than 10 percent. “If we could reduce that global energy usage by 10 percent, by improving the efficiency of routing, we now have something that has a global impact on our carbon loading of the atmosphere,” Smith said. “These coalition members would very much like to be operating in concert with us and have the same cloudbased architecture disseminating their navigation services.”

The U.S. EEZ – an area extending outward up to 200 nautical miles from U.S. territorial seas where it retains jurisdiction over natural resources – is among the largest in the world, larger than the combined land area of all 50 states. With the advent of side-scanning multibeam echo sounders, NOAA has helped to lead a 21st-century transformation in the field of hydrography: measuring and describing the physical features of bodies of water. Still, we know remarkably little about the U.S. EEZ. More than half of U.S. and Great Lakes waters have not been mapped to modern standards.

Knowing the depth, shape, and composition of the seafloor beneath U.S. waters is critical to understanding, developing, conserving, and managing offshore resources – including wildlife, energy resources, and the valuable minerals used to build everything from jet engines to cell phones. The United States imports nearly all of these critical minerals, which is a serious national security vulnerability.

In November of 2019, the Trump administration directed NOAA and other federal agencies to develop a national strategy to map, explore, and characterize the U.S. EEZ and the Alaskan coastline – which, historically icebound for nearly the entire year, has emerged as a navigable seacoast. The strategy, developed by a task force co-chaired by NOAA Corps Rear Adm. Smith and Dr. Alan Leonardi, director of NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration, aims to map the nation’s deep waters by 2030 and nearshore waters by 2040.

It’s an ambitious goal, Leonardi said, that will require two important transformations. “It’s become abundantly clear that, A, the government can’t do this alone,” he said. “And B, we’re not going to get it done in a timely fashion using the technology that exists today.”

The new strategy builds on existing public and private partnerships to pool capabilities and avoid overlapping efforts. A recent 5 percent increase in EEZ mapping, Smith said, was achieved largely through consolidating the hydrography of federal, state, academic, private, and non-government organizations. “A lot of those gains were achieved by gathering up data that already exists,” said Smith, “not from NOAA surveys, but from other scientific agencies, and getting them into the archive where they can be accessible.”

The mapping strategy also will rely increasingly on new and emerging science and technology. Mapping the seafloor is painstaking and often tedious work, referred to as “mowing the lawn”: Surface vessels, sometimes aided by a remotely operated robot, sail back and forth across the ocean, scanning line after line. “To use ships with tethered robots to fully explore the U.S. EEZ will take centuries or longer,” Leonardi said. “If we use newer autonomous vehicles, it can likely be accomplished in decades.”

In the summer of 2020, the Coast Survey dispatched four autonomous surface vehicles – saildrones, which have already proven useful for conducting fisheries surveys and other remote sensing operations for NOAA – to the Arctic, to conduct the first uncrewed hydrographic survey ever performed. The saildrones, equipped with side-scanning sonar, will conduct programmed bathymetric surveys and produce high-definition charts of the seafloor along Alaska’s North Slope.

Saildrones and other uncrewed systems, operating on the surface and underwater, will likely play a role in expanding the reach of U.S. hydrography, Leonardi said. “We don’t see a future without ships,” he said. “But we do see a near future, probably in the next five years, where we’ve operationalized these robotic vehicles to become force multipliers.”

Americans love their coasts. Ocean-based recreation and tourism employ nearly 2.4 million people, and contribute about $124 billion to the annual U.S. gross domestic product. NOAA works on several fronts to support and enhance the economic and social benefits of coastal and ocean resources.

NOAA’s research programs establish a link between healthy, clean coastal resources and increased tourism-related spending. Coastal cleanup projects, coordinated and supported by NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, help draw more tourists and recreational users to coastal communities. These users are protected by NOAA’s harmful algal bloom (HAB) forecasts, which map blooms, measure toxins, and provide water-quality data to coastal managers.

The nation’s most iconic marine resources are protected by the 14 national marine sanctuaries, which generate about $8 billion annually for coastal economies. According to John Armor, who directs NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, the agency is involved in several efforts to maintain and even expand the appeal of the ecological and cultural assets it oversees.

The Mission: Iconic Reef program, for example, is a historic multi-partner effort to restore parts of the Flor- ida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which protects the only barrier coral reef in the continental United States, and which has taken a beating from hurricanes, boat groundings, ocean warming, and pollution. “Several programs within NOAA, including ours, are working together to restore these seven reefs of the Florida Keys,” Armor said. “We’re going to restore them to a level that provides important services for the community, and that are needed to maintain a healthy ecosystem, which drives the local economy. It is just an unprecedented and visionary project we’ve embarked on.”

Only one sanctuary has been added to the system in the past two decades – the Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, about 40 miles south of Washington, D.C., designated in November 2019 – but the system has plans to expand opportunities for recreation and tourism. In May of 2020, NOAA submitted a proposal to bring 15 additional reefs under the protective umbrella of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, off the Texas and Louisiana Coasts, where some of the world’s healthiest coral ecosystems are located.

Above: A diver explores the wreck of the USS Monitor, located in the depths of Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. A pending proposal aims to expand the sanctuary that was established to protect the site of the sunken ironclad. Right: A team in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument sits atop a massive pile of fishing nets, rope, and other debris cleaned from beaches in the monument. Such coastal cleanup projects, coordinated by NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, help to attract tourists and recreational users to coastal communities.

There is also a pending proposal to expand the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, the nation’s first national marine sanctuary, established to protect the site where the ironclad USS Monitor sank southeast of Cape Hatteras on New Year’s Eve 1862. NOAA is working closely with various stakeholders on the development of these exciting proposals.

Not many Americans know it, but the area is also near what was known during World War II as Torpedo Alley, the Outer Banks waters where German U-boats sank more than 300 merchant ships and battled British naval ships before the United States entered the war. At least 65 wrecks have been identified in the area. “That is no less important to our democracy, to our history, than places like Gettysburg or Normandy or Pearl Harbor,” Armor said. “NOAA has an opportunity, through expansion of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, to protect the shipwrecks and also interpret the battlefield in a way that’s never been done before.”

Meanwhile, proposals for new national marine sanctuaries in the Great Lakes region are moving forward: off the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, and another off New York’s Lake Ontario shore. If designated and brought into the National Marine Sanctuary System, Armor said, each will protect cultural resources – merchant and military shipwrecks – as well as help tell the story of how cultures have been navigating these waters for thousands of years. “For the communities,” said Armor, “we’ll be shining a light on their rich historic resources, providing opportunities and incentives for people to travel to these places and enjoy them. And we’ll also be bringing more Great Lakes communities into the conversation about ocean conservation. I think this is a tremendous opportunity to add value not only to these communities, but to the National Marine Sanctuary System as a whole.”