This study derives potential wave energy fluxes from long-term climatological wave height/period statistics for virtually all coastal areas of the world. The basic input data are visual wave observations made from ships. Although visual wave data contain certain biases, mostly resulting in underestimation of the available energy resource, they are the only homogeneous data source available for most coastal areas of the world. In order to reduce biases, hindcast data are employed to develop correction factors for visual height and period estimates from ships. These transformations, developed for areas with both ship data and hindcast data, are applied globally to derive wave energy estimates.