The concept
What is the Blue Economy?
"Where what's best for your health and the environment is cheapest, and where life's necessities are free thanks to a local production and consumption system that works with what you already have." Inspired by Nature, it changes the rules of the game and develops the territory from what is available there. Distinct from the generic maritime economy.
Nature knows no waste, and everyone has a job.
Putting Nature back on its evolutionary path
In honour of Aurelio Peccei, a former FIAT top executive and the founder of the Club of Rome, Gunter Pauli set out the vision of a Blue Economy where Nature returns to its evolutionary path and a positive symbiosis with human systems is achieved. Society is engaged, and each person is inspired by the part they play.
By harnessing physics and applying Nature's ingenuity we make better use of what is locally available, so that all needs can be met, starting with the basic needs: water, food, shelter, health care, energy and jobs. This vision is based on a clear understanding that Nature's ecosystems have evolved in the face of nearly every imaginable challenge over the past few hundred million years, and therefore provide a wealth of experience on how we, as a society, can chart a pathway towards the future.
The framework the author gives it holds in one sentence: be inspired by Nature, change the rules of the game, first grow the local economy, in order to better respond to people's needs through a much greater focus on the use of what is locally available.
The Blue Economy, as defined by the author, covers the whole Earth, which looks blue from outer space and which thrives under a blue sky when looking up. In between is this space where water dominates in the air and in the seas. Few realise that 91 % of the space on Earth where life thrives is in the water.
Where it comes from
The Blue Economy was not conceived at a desk. It grew out of a failure, a challenge from the United Nations, and thirty years of implementation on the ground.
In the 1980s
Publishing the alarm
Reading the books of Lester Brown and his team at the Worldwatch Institute, Gunter Pauli created a dedicated publishing company to bring State of the World and Vital Signs to a recalcitrant listener: the business community in Europe. As an early member of the Club of Rome, he could never separate the negative conclusions of Limits to Growth from positive action.
Ecover
The lesson of the palm oil
At the head of Ecover, a Europe-based producer of biodegradable cleaning products, he saw the industry adopt his biodegradable ingredient, the fatty acids of palm oil, as a standard replacement for petrochemical surfactants. Demand soared, harvesters in Indonesia replaced vast swathes of rainforest with palm tree farms, and much of the habitat of the orangutan was lost. Biodegradability and renewability, he learned to his chagrin, do not equate with sustainability.
1991, Seoul
Emulate the efficiency of ecosystems
In his first article on the subject, published in Seoul, Korea, he exhorted the industry to emulate the efficiency of ecosystems. Sustainability, the article argued, was only foreseeable when our system eliminates the concept of waste, and starts cascading nutrients and energy as Nature does.
Three years before Kyoto
The challenge of the United Nations University
Prof. Dr. Heitor Gurgulino de Souza, Rector of the United Nations University hosted by the Japanese government, challenged him to model an economic system that generated no waste and no emissions, yet created jobs, contributed social capital, and did not entail a higher cost. He accepted the challenge three years before the Kyoto Protocol was approved.
After three years of research
ZERI, then Blue Innovations
In cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme, the ZERI Foundation was established, and later Blue Innovations in Switzerland, with the sole objective to implement pioneering cases that could demonstrate a scientifically feasible and economically viable model of production and consumption.
The first decade
From 3,000 cases to 100 innovations
The Board of ZERI commissioned an inventory of innovations inspired by natural systems. The review team ploughed through thousands of peer-reviewed articles in English, complemented with Spanish, German and Japanese publications. Over 3,000 cases were sifted, a shortlist of 340 technologies was submitted to corporate strategists, expert financiers, investigative journalists and public policymakers, and two years of meetings with inventors and entrepreneurs in all four corners of the world sharpened the logic behind the ultimate selection of the 100 most remarkable innovations.
2009
A report to the Club of Rome
The first edition of The Blue Economy was written in 2009 and signed in La Miñoca, Colombia, on the 10th of January 2010. With the support of Anders Wijkman and Ashok Khosla, at the time co-presidents of the Club of Rome, the book was recognised as A Report to the Club of Rome.
2026
Six editions, and ministries
The book has been translated into nearly 60 languages and will soon bypass 8 million copies. Updated editions followed for South Africa (2.0), India (3.0), Australia (4.0), Nigeria and Malaysia (5.0), and now the 2026 Islands edition (6.0). More telling still: 23 governments from around the world have created a Ministry for the Blue Economy.
Red, green, blue
To situate the Blue Economy, the author compares it to the two models it moves beyond. The wording below is his own, in the preface of the book.
It borrows and never repays
A bankrupt economic model that borrows, from Nature, from humanity, from the commons of all, with no thought of repayment beyond postponement to the future. Insatiable economies of scale callously search for ever lower marginal costs for each additional unit manufactured, making dismissive abstraction of all unintended consequences.
Pay more to achieve the same, or less
The green economy model has required companies to invest more and consumers to pay more, to achieve the same, or even less, while preserving the environment. In spite of much goodwill and effort, it has not achieved the viability so greatly desired. How can anyone support a market system where the bad is cheap, and the good for you and the environment is expensive?
It engages regeneration
A Blue Economy addresses the issues of sustainability that go beyond mere preservation and begins to engage regeneration. It is about ensuring that ecosystems can maintain their evolutionary path so that all can benefit from Nature's endless flow of creativity, adaptation, and abundance.
The Blue Economy 6.0, preface
Doing less bad, is still bad!
Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy 6.0, chapter 1
Doing less bad is still bad
The slogan was born in 1993, standing in front of the destroyed rainforests, witnessing the rescue of orphaned orangutans: stop doing less bad, start doing more good.
Compared to the old standard of petrochemical surfactants, biodegradable and renewable soaps were an improvement, which the author now describes as less bad. They could claim to be four or five times less harmful to frogs and fish. But soap removes dirt by reducing the surface tension of water, and a prolonged decrease in water surface tension has a negative effect on aquatic life. Because demand rose for the product consumers considered better than the others, the total overall impact could then be much worse than before.
The same reasoning applies to certification. Terms like organic and bio imply the elimination of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides: an independent verification only makes consumers aware of the chemicals that are not included in a product. It offers no insight into what the product does contain, or what it has to offer the farmer, the consumers and the ecosystem in which it grew from seed to maturity.
The Blue Economy asks a harder question instead: are our production methods consistent with Nature's approach, and do they contribute to resilience, social capital and promotion of the Commons locally? Only once we can answer with a resounding yes to both parts have we gone beyond organic and biodegradable.
Waste for one is food for another
Natural systems cascade endlessly, and the term waste has no meaning: anything that is seemingly of no value to the ignorant observer is a desired item for another, without exception. Rather than closing loops to make material flows circular, the Blue Economy imagines a value for everything we have. Coffee has been at the core of that work for the past thirty years, and it shows how far the reasoning goes.
In Australia some 75,000 tonnes of spent coffee grounds are produced each year, with the majority sent to landfill, while Australians consume some 95,000 tonnes of mushrooms. A typical café uses some 5 kg of coffee beans a day and pays approximately US$ 900 a year in waste collection costs to send its spent grounds to the landfill. Inspired by this opportunity, Ryan Creed and Julien Mitchell left their fly-in-fly-out jobs in mining to set up the first urban mushroom facility based on coffee waste in Australia, in Fremantle, Western Australia, in late 2015, and have since also set up operations in Margaret River, Melbourne and Noosa. Some 6,000 entrepreneurs have been inspired by this opportunity and decided to do it.
The spent substrate left after harvesting the mushrooms can be converted to animal feed, generating three revenues instead of one, at a cost of protein lower than that of imported food and feed. Given that the worldwide volume of coffee waste surpasses 10 million tonnes, at least 10 million tonnes of mushrooms and 4 million tonnes of animal feed can be locally produced.
Then comes the farm. The part of the harvest traded as green beans represents only 20 % of the biomass collected each season. Coffee is a fruit, and happens to be the richest source of antioxidants in the world. Grown organically under the canopy of a tropical rainforest, the cascara, the skin of the bean, can be dried in the sun and converted into a rich food. This is the business model of Osvaldo Acevedo at El Roble in Santander, Colombia, one of the largest organic coffee farms. Using the whole cherry instead of the best beans alone multiplies by five the value offered to the farmer, and empowers that farmer to take care of the forest, even to expand it.
What has been implemented
The Blue Economy is measured by what stands on the ground. These are the figures the author gives in the 2026 edition.
- 200+
- projects backed, in over 200 sectors of the economy
- US$ 5 bn
- invested in just over two hundred projects
- 4 million
- jobs generated by 2025, an estimate
- 3
- of these initiatives valued at over one billion dollars
- 25
- islands assisted in building a Portfolio of Opportunities
- 23
- governments with a Ministry for the Blue Economy
Encouraging, and yet, in the author's own words, a mere trickle for a world that needs a vast river of one billion new jobs.
Four families of principles
In the 2026 edition, the author gathers the practice into four axes. The first three are broken down into principles, the fourth stands alone.
Be Continually Inspired by Nature
Natural systems cascade endlessly, and the term waste has no meaning: whatever seems worthless to one is a desired item for another. Once we truly embrace Nature as our inspiration, we see the opportunities that were right in front of us.
Change the Rules of the Game
The Blue Economy does not merely embrace change, it designs for continuous change for the better. Multiple interconnected revenue streams shift competition to the level of the system, rather than the individual product or service.
Focus on What is Locally Available
Whenever a problem emerges, the reflex is to bring in solutions, materials or products from elsewhere. Here it is the last option: aid and imports create dependency, while what is locally available creates autonomy.
See Change as the Only Constant
The principles are only the beginning. The Blue Economy has no dogmatic axioms and no trademarked concepts: its practitioners embrace change as the only constant, and are prepared to unlearn what they have learned.
Not to be confused
The expression blue economy is also used, in a maritime sense, for the economic exploitation of the oceans: fishing, ports, shipping, coastal tourism. That is not the subject of this site.
The Blue Economy described here is the model of Gunter Pauli and the ZERI network. As defined by the author, it covers the whole Earth, which looks blue from outer space, and applies to every sector: water, energy, food, materials, housing, health, jobs. The sea is one of its fields, not its boundary.
Nothing is cast in stone
The Blue Economy is an open and evolving concept. Thousands of people around the world contributed to it, and the philosophy that we can always improve, do better, much better, guides the practice. The principles grow and adapt every time they are applied.
Continue
Source · Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy 6.0, The Islands Edition, 2026. Preface, foreword to the island edition, chapters 1, 2 and 5, epilogue.