Yesterday THE ECONOMIST organized an informative webcast: the inaugural World Ocean Summit Insight Hour. The organizer mentioned that more than 1.000 people were attending the webcast. Everything was functioning very well if you think what amount of people were listing, asking questions, and voting.
There were exciting presentations. Not really something new, but that’s not what I expected either. It was a successful update and a proper assessment of the general mood in this sector.
Later on, I was astonished about the online voting. However, there is broad agreement on the question of who in the Blue Economy, has been particularly affected by COVID-19. Almost 70 percent of the voting participants thought that this was the tourism sector (fisheries followed with 11 percent, far behind).
Hard times for tourism?
Interestingly, when asked who would benefit most from overcoming the crisis, it was not tourism that prevailed but offshore renewables (35.6 percent), followed by aquaculture (23.1 percent). Tourism, with a flagging 11 percent, was only in fourth place. Hard times for tourism?
Who will benefit after the COVID-19 crisis?
Only once was I surprised by the widespread optimism that the sustainable green-blue transition would benefit most from the crisis (66.1 percent) and not the return to business as usual (23.1 percent).
I would like to see that too, honestly, very much, but I suspect that the trend towards the status quo ante will become quite dominant. The world was supposed to be a different place after 9/11, but it wasn’t, and if it was, it was more likely to be negative.
Is it a good or a bad sign that optimism is so widespread among the participants? Or were the participants already in a somewhat optimistic mood because this clientele was chosen with care? Who knows for sure?
Nevertheless, the webinar was an excellent opportunity to get an assessment of the general mood in the ocean (blue) sector.
