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1. Building the Blue: Identifying Educational Requirements of the Future Ocean Technical Workforce

   Carlan, Karin (September 2024, NSF)

   Moulton, Erica; Sager, Jessica; Fischer, Tina (Ed.)

   Blue Economy industry and education stakeholders, students, potential employees and other stakeholders from across the nation gathered at St. Petersburg College (SPC) Epicenter and Collaborative Labs on September 13, 2024 to discuss Building the Blue: Identifying Educational Requirements of the Future Ocean Technical Workforce, through a grant received from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

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2. MARCOL: A Maritime Collision Avoidance Decision-Making Testbed

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i13.27076  

   Jeong, Mingi; Quattrini Li, Alberto (June 2023, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Safe and efficient maritime navigation is fundamental for autonomous surface vehicles to support many applications in the blue economy, including cargo transportation that covers 90% of the global marine industry. We developed MARCOL, a collision avoidance decision-making framework that provides safe, efficient, and explainable collision avoidance strategies and that allows for repeated experiments under diverse high-traffic scenarios. 

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3. Global GIS Mapping of Ocean Multi-Use Potential with Offshore Wind and Tourism

   Walker, S.; Walsh, J.P. (January 2022, Ocean Sciences Meeting)

   Human activity along our coasts and throughout our oceans has been increasing over the past few decades. In 2017, the output of the global Blue Economy was estimated at €1.3 trillion, and that value is expected to more than double by 2030. Offshore wind and tourism are major sectors in the blue economy, and they have the potential to function jointly through multi-use, thereby creating added benefits for both sectors as well as society overall. To contribute to the assessment of multi-use’s viability, this project has evaluated existing areas where offshore wind and tourism are successfully infused together and globally identified additional areas where they are likely to work together. Taking advantage of multi-use is becoming increasingly beneficial. By having industries function jointly in the same space, instead of parceling out ocean space by industry, the blue economy can remain sustainable and competitive. Early identification of these areas viable for offshore wind and tourism multi-use is important not only to businesses and coastal communities, but to the sustainable future of our oceans. The areas that are likely to benefit the most from this form of multi-use can be identified using GIS to analyze ocean space. First, datasets including ship density, wind speed, light at night, and tourism arrivals were used to understand both environmental and social factors indicative of supporting this form of multi-use. Then, these factors were spatially quantified and aggregated together in ArcGIS to identify locations best suited to combining offshore wind and tourism. Results indicate a higher potential for multi-use success in higher populated and more developed regions. Low population limits the potential for this type of multi-use in many areas, but a smaller-scale, regional analysis would provide more detailed insight into specific regions. 

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4. Water-food-energy challenges in India: political economy of the sugar industry

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab9925  

   Lee, Ju Young; Naylor, Rosamond L.; Figueroa, Anjuli Jain; Gorelick, Steven M. (July 2020, Environmental Research Letters)

   Abstract Sugar is the second largest agro-based industry in India and has a major influence on the country’s water, food, and energy security. In this paper, we use a nexus approach to assess India’s interconnected water-food-energy challenges, with a specific focus on the political economy of the sugar industry in Maharashtra, one of the country’s largest sugar producing states. Our work underscores three points. First, the governmental support of the sugar industry is likely to persist because policymakers are intricately tied to that industry. Entrenched political interests have continued policies that incentivize sugar production. As surplus sugar has been produced, the government introduced additional policies to reduce this excess and thereby protect the sugar industry. Second, although the sugar economy is important to India, sugar policies have had detrimental effects on both water and nutrition. Long-standing government support for sugarcane pricing and sales has expanded water-intensive sugarcane irrigation in low-rainfall areas in Maharashtra, which has reduced the state’s freshwater resources and restricted irrigation of more nutritious crops. Despite its poor nutritional value, empty-calorie sugar has been subsidized through the public distribution system. Third, the Indian government is now promoting sugarcane-based ethanol production. This policy has the benefit of providing greater energy security and creating a new demand for surplus sugar in the Indian market. Our analysis shows that a national biofuel policy promoting the production of ethanol from sugarcane juice versus directly from molasses may help reduce subsidized sugar for human consumption without necessarily expanding water and land use for additional production of sugarcane. 

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5. Integrated Mechanistic Engineering Models and Macroeconomic Input-Output approach to Model Physical Economy for Evaluating the Impact of transition to Circular Economy

   https://doi.org/10.1039/D1EE00544H  

   Vunnava, Venkata Sai; Singh, Shweta (January 2021, Energy & Environmental Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Sustainable transition to low carbon and zero waste economy requires a macroscopic evaluation of opportunities and impact of adopting emerging technologies in a region. However, a full assessment of current physical flows and wastes is a tedious task, thus leading to lack of comprehensive assessment before scale up and adoption of emerging technologies. Utilizing the mechanistic models developed for engineering and biological systems with macroeconomic framework of Input-Output models, we propose a novel integrated approach to fully map the physical economy, that automates the process of mapping industrial flows and wastes in a region. The approach is demonstrated by mapping the agro-based physical economy of the state of Illinois, USA by using mechanistic models for 10 sectors, which have high impact on waste generation. Each model mechanistically simulates the material transformation processes in the economic sector and provides the material flow information for mapping. The model for physical economy developed in the form of a Physical Input-Output Table (PIOT) captures the interindustry physical interactions in the region and waste flows, thus providing insights into the opportunities to implement circular economy strategies i.e., adoption of recycling technologies at large scale. In Illinois, adoption of technologies for industrial waste-water & hog manure recycling will have the highest impact by reducing > 62 % of hog industry waste, > 99 % of soybean hull waste, and > 96 % of dry corn milling (corn ethanol production) waste reduction. Small % reduction in fertilizer manufacturing waste was also observed. The physical economy model revealed that Urea sector had the highest material use of 5.52E+08 tons and green bean farming with lowest material use of 1.30E+05 tons for the year modeled (2018). The mechanistic modeling also allowed to capture elemental flows across the physical economy with Urea sector using 8.25E+07 tons of carbon per operation-year (highest) and bean farming using 3.90E+04 tons of elemental carbon per operation-year (least). The approach proposed here establishes a connection between engineering and physical economy modeling community for standardizing the mapping of physical economy that can provide insights for successfully transitioning to a low carbon and zero waste circular economy. 

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