Imagine a future where people benefit from and enjoy a cleaner, healthier community and ocean that they’ve helped to protect and conserve, simply by making personal choices that matter. The Ocean Project is dedicated to make that vision become a reality. We partner with organizations and individuals from all over the world across many industries, and especially focus on engaging and empowering young people to step up as leaders for a better future.
Picture our planet from space. It’s a blue planet, thanks to the ocean that covers 71 percent of the surface. Our blue backyard – the streams, rivers, and other waterways – all connect where we live with the ocean, which is downstream from everyone.
The importance of oceans
Not only is the world’s ocean an economic driver, but it also generates most of the oxygen we breathe, feeds us, makes our planet’s climate livable, cleans the water we drink, offers us unknown discoveries such as future medicines, and provides boundless inspiration. And while it’s vast, the ocean faces serious threats from climate change, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, overfishing, and related environmental and sustainability issues.
World Oceans Day is a global opportunity for raising awareness and promoting personal and community action in fun and positive ways. It provides a unique rallying point for the world to unite in celebrating the importance of our ocean and also taking actions, big and small, to help with solutions. It inspires positive change not only on June 8, but also throughout all 365 days of the year. No matter where we live, from the Carolinas to Kansas to California, we all need a healthy ocean to survive and thrive. Our decisions affect the ocean, and World Oceans Day allows us to work together to bring about real change.
Lowering pollution
Plastic pollution is a critically important ocean issue that each one of us can help address by saying no to single-use plastics like plastic straws, water bottles, and bags at stores, and instead choosing to make a difference by using durable and reusable products more often, at home, school, work, and in our communities.
Since 2002, The Ocean Project has been the lead global coordinator of World Oceans Day, collaborating with thousands of organizations worldwide and helping to make it a day of opportunity to elevate the profile of the world’s ocean. We believe that each of us can help in small and big ways to bring about a better future. If we protect and restore our shared ocean, we protect our planet so that generations of humans and other animals can survive and thrive.
Together, with millions of others around our planet, we encourage you to get involved this World Oceans Day to address these issues, so that we can protect and restore our ocean.