The Blue Economy

See also the article in French on the blue economy as a concept

The Blue Economy: 10 years – 100 innovations – 100 million jobs is a book by Gunter Pauli. The book expresses the ultimate aim that a Blue Economy business model will shift society from scarcity to abundance "with what is locally available", by tackling issues that cause environmental and related problems in new ways. The book highlights potential benefits in connecting and combining seemingly disparate environmental problems with open-source scientific solutions based upon physical processes common in the natural world, to create solutions that are both environmentally beneficial and which have financial and wider social benefits. The book suggests that we can alter the way in which we run our industrial processes and tackle resultant environmental problems, refocusing from the use of rare and high-energy cost resources to instead seek solutions based upon simpler and cleaner technologies. The book proposes to focus on the generation of more value, instead of blindly cutting costs. The book aims to inspire entrepreneurs to adopt its insights, by demonstrating ways in which this can create economic benefits via job creation, reduced energy use, and more revenue streams from each step of the process, at the same time benefiting the communities involved. 'The Blue Economy' is presented in 14 chapters, each of which investigates an aspect of the world’s economies and offers a series of innovations capable of making aspects of those economies sustainable. By 2014, the book has been translated into +30 languages worldwide. ^[1][2]

Background

The book was written by Gunter Pauli as Founder and Director of Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives. Pauli cites 20 years of experiences and nearly 200 successful projects all over the world as the basis for the ideas presented in his book.^[3]

The Blue Economy began as a project to find 100 of the best nature-inspired technologies that could affect the economies of the world, while sustainably providing basic human needs – potable water, food, jobs, and habitable shelter. Starting with 2,231 peer review articles Dr. Pauli and his team found 340 innovations that could be bundled into systems that function the way ecosystems do. These were then additionally reviewed by a group of corporate strategists, expert financiers, and public policy makers. Further meetings with entrepreneurs, financial analysts, business reporters, and corporate strategy academics reduced the list to one hundred. These are listed in an appendix of The Blue Economy.^[1]

See also

References

External links

• Video, speech of Gunter Pauli at next! Conference
• Cartoon video presenting the Blue Economy
• Publisher Paradigm Publications
• The Blue Economy is the ZERI Philosophy in Action
• The Official Website