What is Ocean Literacy? 

• November 4, 2026

Ocean literacy is defined as an understanding of the ocean’s influence on you, and your influence on the ocean. UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission frames an ocean-literate person as someone who understands the ocean’s importance to humankind, can communicate meaningfully about it, and is equipped to make informed, responsible decisions about ocean resources. Crucially, ocean literacy goes beyond simply educating people about marine facts, it’s specifically designed to trigger behavioural change and build an entire ocean-literate society rather than just a well-informed one.

The Seven Principles Everyone Should Know

The scientific foundation of ocean literacy rests on seven Essential Principles first developed by American ocean science and education organisations and now adopted globally as the standard framework. These principles cover everything from Earth’s single interconnected ocean system to humanity’s inseparable relationship with it, and together they define what any ocean-literate citizen should understand. The seven core ideas are:

• The Earth has one big ocean with many features
• The ocean and life in the ocean shape the features of Earth
• The ocean is a major influence on weather and climate
• The ocean makes Earth habitable
• The ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems
• The ocean and humans are inextricably interconnected
• The ocean is largely unexplored

That final principle is worth pausing on, since it reminds us ocean literacy isn’t a finished body of settled facts, it’s an evolving field where scientists are still mapping out enormous unknowns about the very system supporting most life on Earth.

One Analogy: Financial Literacy for the Sea

Think of ocean literacy the same way you’d think about financial literacy. Someone financially illiterate doesn’t necessarily lack money, they simply don’t understand how interest, debt, or investment actually function, which means they make decisions without grasping the consequences those decisions carry. Ocean literacy works identically: most people interact with the ocean constantly, through the fish they eat, the oxygen they breathe, the weather patterns shaping their week, yet without understanding those connections, they make everyday choices with no sense of how those choices ripple back into ocean health. Just as financial literacy empowers someone to manage money responsibly, ocean literacy empowers someone to manage their relationship with the sea responsibly.

A Persistent Awareness Gap

Despite the ocean’s outsized role in regulating climate and sustaining life, most people remain disconnected from that reality in their daily thinking. UNESCO’s own assessment states plainly that most of us live our lives unaware of how our day-to-day actions impact ocean health, or how ocean health impacts our own daily lives in return. This gap matters enormously given how central the ocean actually is: it produces most of the planet’s oxygen, regulates global weather and climate systems, and supports biodiversity on a scale still not fully catalogued by science. The UN’s Ocean Literacy for All initiative was specifically created to close this gap, aiming to raise awareness of ocean conservation, restoration, and sustainable use while building a genuinely improved public knowledge base.

How Ocean Literacy Gets Built in Europe

The EU4Ocean Coalition of Ocean Literacy, funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, connects organisations, projects, and individuals across Europe working toward a shared goal: an ocean-literate society capable of managing marine resources sustainably. One of its flagship initiatives, the Network of European Blue Schools, brings the ocean directly into classrooms through project-based learning that engages students with water, marine, and maritime topics to build genuine awareness and a sense of responsibility. The network’s scale has grown substantially, and as of early 2026 counted 732 accredited Blue Schools, with new cohorts of teachers regularly onboarded through dedicated webinars and training sessions.

PHAROS’s Contribution to Ocean-Literate Communities

PHAROS builds ocean literacy directly into its Living Labs strategy, working closely with sister project ProBleu to expand the Blue Schools Network across the Atlantic and Arctic basin specifically, a region historically underrepresented compared to the Mediterranean’s concentration of accredited schools. In Gran Canaria, PHAROS partners CSIC and PLOCAN delivered a dedicated webinar to 28 local teachers and educators, walking them through the Blue Schools accreditation and funding process while sharing inspirational examples from schools already active in the network. A follow-up seminar for Canary Islands teachers focused explicitly on celebrating existing achievements while planning the network’s continued expansion across both basins.

The MINKA citizen science platform gives this classroom-based learning a hands-on dimension that pure lecture-style education can’t replicate, letting students and citizens contribute real observations of marine species and habitats that feed directly into ongoing PHAROS research. As one Blue Schools coordinator put it during a recent Living Lab session, earning Blue School status shows a school is genuinely “interested in helping your students get to know the sea better, feel connected to it,” reflecting ocean literacy’s core aim of building emotional investment, not just factual knowledge. That combination, structured curriculum plus direct citizen science participation, is precisely what UNESCO’s global framework calls for: moving ocean literacy out of textbooks and into a lived, ongoing relationship between people and the sea they depend on.