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The “Blue Economy” is a recent topic of study that spans those economic activities which depend on ecosystem services, thereby including such sectors as tourism, maritime transport, energy, water, fishing, among others. However, there is only limited research approaching the added value produced by marine activities connected with these sectors. This research contributes to the literature by providing interpretations of blue economy factors in terms of their added economic value. The authors deployed secondary data from 2009 to 2020 from the European Union Economy Database to analyze six sectors involving maritime activities: coastal tourism, living marine resources, non-living marine resources, port activities, shipbuilding and repair, and maritime transport. This study highlights how the sustainability of countries depends on the ability to manage their natural resources, especially maritime resources. Furthermore, sustainability depends on the economic interpretation of countries and sectors over time with regard to creating value and managing the activities derived from ecosystem services.

This chapter explores the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from an Islamic Shari'ah-compliant perspective. It provides a comprehensive literature review on CSR with an explicit focus on the Islamic perspective of CSR, Islamic models of CSR, CSR practices in conventional and Islamic banks, and the consequences of CSR to Islamic banks. This chapter's main contribution lies in considering the current CSR literature from a Shari'ah perspective. Likewise, it identifies gaps in the current literature and suggests potential areas for future research. This chapter attempts to improve the understanding of how Islamic banks integrate social responsibility into their operations. The insights from this chapter are helpful to practitioners and academic scholars in Islamic finance, accounting, and CSR. This chapter emphasizes the importance of incorporating Islamic values and principles into CSR practices and encourages further research and investigation in this area.

The evolution of tourism must be framed into policies that aim a development model perspective for the destinations, based on the analysis of economic, political, and social indicators. Therefore, emerging destinations, located in territories with low population density, should be a target of a careful strategy policy, considering the characteristics of the region. In particular, the disaster caused by the pandemic context (i.e., COVID-19) implied profound changes in tourism thinking, planning, and development of regions in Portugal and throughout the world. The present chapter proposes the creation of a tourism monitoring system for Arouca (Portugal), a territory classified as Low-Density Territory, with specific characteristics. The monitoring will involve the planning and management of database, at the disposal of all stakeholders, ensuring that the tourism flows in analysis do not get overwhelmed, allowing the discussion of opportunities and threats for the territory, based on the partnership between the population, public and private sector, adjusted to the social, cultural, economic, and environment perception. Will also be considered the perspective of the local community from Arouca's region, the main actors from the territory such as Geopark Association of Arouca and the City Council, according to the surveys used as data basis of this study, along with statistics analysis.