Martin Visbeck

Existing attempts to quantitatively assess the sustainability of the ocean in quantitative terms (Halpern et al. 2012) lack a consistent conceptual underpinning (Rickels et al. 2014). Here we propose to extend the economic concept of comprehensive wealth by taking a broader normative basis from environmental ethics into account, and to apply it for the first time to a complex and interacting system with multiple uses—the ocean. In an interdisciplinary endeavor comprising scientific modeling, economics and environmental ethics, we will assess, and quantify for a case study of the Baltic Sea, how uncertainties in ocean understanding and prediction, ambiguities about future ocean management, and potential disagreements about sustainability norms affect the measure of comprehensive blue wealth. While running the risk that uncertainties may turn out to be huge, the project also has the potential to go a major first step towards becoming a cornerstone of a solutionoriented, large-scale integrative research project beyond Future Ocean phase II.