Zac Hart, Coastal
Management Specialist, NOAA Coastal Services Center
Everybody knows that the oceans, Great Lakes, and their
associated coastlines serve as economic engines. We play on the beaches, ship
cargo on the surface of the water, catch fish from the oceans and Great Lakes,
and extract oil, gas, sand, and gravel from beneath their surfaces. The
economic activity stemming from these resources can serve as main sources of economic
development in a community.
Historically, data and information specifically on the
economic contributions of the oceans and Great Lakes have been difficult to
find because they’ve been buried in much larger, national data sets. The
Coastal Services Center, an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), has tackled this problem by creating the free Economics: National Ocean
Watch (ENOW) data set.
ENOW
features 2005-2010 data on the “ocean and Great Lakes economy,” which is made
up of six economic sectors that depend on the oceans and Great Lakes. The
following graphic summarizes the ocean and Great Lakes economy detailed in ENOW.
ENOW uses common economic indicators, such as employment and
gross domestic product, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of
Economic Analysis. The data are available for coastal counties, states,
regions, and the entire coastal United States. Best of all, the data are available
in a wide
variety of formats:
- Coastal County Snapshots, easy-to-understand stories about each coastal county, complete with charts and graphs
- The ENOW Explorer, a tool that allows users to see economic changes from place to place and over time
- The ENOW Data Wizard, a tool that allows users to download or copy subsets of the data that interest them most
Economic development professionals and other officials can visit
the ENOW website
to find out more about the importance of coastal, Great Lakes, and ocean
resources in their areas. The Center provides additional
economic data sets, including data from the U.S. Census Bureau on
self-employed people, and offers support to
help properly apply ENOW data and economic methods to individual communities.
