Aquatic environments cover more than 70% of our planet’s surface and the value of the global oceans is estimated to be US$24 trillion.

The scale and importance of aquatic systems impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services and is critical to addressing crucial challenges in climate change, biodiversity loss, and safeguarding human health and well-being. However, despite the fundamental importance of these systems, there are large gaps in our conceptual knowledge and practice on how to best govern aquatic environments for the common good. New holistic solutions are urgently needed.

The Centre for Blue Governance at the University of Portsmouth aims to meet the holistic and multi-disciplinary research needed to inform blue governance mechanisms. The CBG takes a more expansive view of Blue Economy to encompass marine and freshwater systems and conceptualises them as development spaces.

The overall objective of the Centre is multidisciplinary collaboration to contribute to the design, setting-up and implementation of blue growth in countries, regions and political entities. It will develop and provide inter-disciplinary research expertise at both sectoral (various economic branches) and overall levels (coordination, planning) with a strong emphasis on the challenge synergising nature conservation and economic development.

The Centre for Blue Governance will also serve as a nexus to facilitate collaboration across stakeholders in blue governance. It provides multi-discipline expertise to the multi-sector and multi-user landscape of aquatic governance. The Centre's activities encompass research, development policies, social justice and education.

The CBG tackles new and current research themes but also elaborates on new research areas. Our work encompasses numerous sub-topics and four central themes:

• Blue policies, planning and security
• Blue energy, technologies and transport solutions
• Biodiversity, blue carbon and climate change
• Aquatic resources management