As general director of the Barcelona-based company Seasatainable Ventures, Ignasi Ferrer Pellicer identifies technological solutions that contribute to the sustainable management of the marine environment and helps them to enter the market in the form of scalable and profitable startups. His work is part of what is known as the blue economy, a subsector on which he gave a lecture at the Museu de la Ciència CosmoCaixa in Barcelona.
Can we live from the sea and with the sea, without destroying it?
The answer is a resounding yes, but not as we have been doing until now and this is what gives rise to the blue economy. We must apply scientific knowledge and available or developing technologies to make this life of the sea and with the sea possible.
How can technology help?
Technology is an essential part of the great leap that the blue economy has taken in recent years. When the concept was born, in 2012, scientific and technological research began on how to live from the sea and with the sea. In the technological field there are two fronts. One is the traditional marine economy with sectors such as fishing, cruise ships, maritime transport or oil platforms. Thanks to technology, these activities can be made more sustainable. For example, that fishing does not overexploit the available resources, that maritime transport is less polluting or minimize the environmental impacts and biodiversity loss of oil extraction. Technology is already making these advances possible.
And the second technological front?
It is the creation of new economic activities that can already be sustainable. The most fundamental is the regenerative economy. That is, the fact of being able to take advantage of the generation of wealth itself as a tool to regenerate the marine environment.
What is this regenerative economy and why is it necessary?
The regenerative economy is a new concept that arises from the moment in which techniques and solutions begin to be developed to recover the marine environment and, with it, the ecosystem services that had been lost. These services can be monetized and, therefore, can finance the regeneration of the environment itself and also generate an economic return.
Any example of regenerative economy?
Thanks to technology we can recover degraded spaces, such as Posidonia meadows. From here, we recover an ecosystem service, such as carbon sequestration, but at the same time we generate a new economic activity, in the form of regenerative tourism in this case, with people practicing diving, for example. Another possible case is the recovery of marine life in ports or offshore platforms. There are already companies like Ocean Ecostructures that have the technology to do this. From the regeneration of marine life in these spaces, ecosystem services arise, such as biodiversity and CO2 credits, but also ecotourism or citizen science activities that can be monetized.
What are the main destructions caused by economic activity in the sea?
Human activities in the sea have always been destructive because we were not aware of its fragility. This knowledge was not available. But today we do know that this impact exists and we can minimize or reduce it, in some cases, and in others these impacts can even be positive. As we move towards greater sustainability, we will make it easier for the marine environment to regenerate itself.
Can we put figures to the costs and benefits of marine restoration?
There is a study that establishes that regenerating all marine life and restoring it has a cost of around 2.5 billion euros and that the benefits it would generate could reach ten billion. That is, the economic benefits are five times greater than the costs. These are hypothetical figures, of large magnitudes, but they help us to give the message that the value of the recovery of the marine environment is significantly higher than the value of the cost of recovery. It is enough to see how many investment funds in the blue economy have appeared in the last two years, because it is being seen that investing in the recovery of the marine environment and in a sustainable marine economy is indeed a profitable action.
Is that why you created Seastainable Ventures?
We started in 2015, when there was still no talk of it, but we did see that there was the possibility of recovering the marine environment. We had been working on a voluntary basis with positive impact investments and collaborating with NGOs and scientists for some time now. We saw that there was a lot of scientific knowledge that needed to be put on the market, but was not. So we thought of creating a platform that would help, on the one hand, to promote knowledge around the blue economy and to build an ecosystem that would connect the different agents. And, on the other hand, to identify opportunities, technologies and solutions and to help them reach the market.
How do they find these opportunities?
We have a radar that works with some 300 scientific entities around the world that allows us to know what is being done and what knowledge is emerging. When we identify a solution that covers a need, we help turn this opportunity into a startup. We are currently helping to give visibility to some seventy startups and we are focused on helping some of them grow.
We are on the right way?
Yes, but as always we would like to go faster. The blue economy has a very important effect on climate change because the seas are one of the main CO2 sequestrants and are also oxygen generators. If we manage to regenerate marine life, we will also increase the oceans' ability to sequester CO2. We have to get the world of investment to see the potential that exists and to promote the blue economy.
Is it difficult for the investment world to bet on the blue economy?
In the last two years the situation has changed a lot. There has been an explosion of investments. More than one billion euros in investment have been raised. But there is still a long way to go. We must make investors understand that investing in regenerating the marine environment is profitable.
