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One of the biggest challenges holding back ocean science and conservation is simply awareness of the importance of the ocean and the issues it faces.

To support the UN Ocean Decade and its goal to improve ocean literacy, The Ocean Agency teamed up with UNESCO, UN Environment Programme, UC Irvine, and our creative partner, Adobe, to launch a program of creative tools and projects to engage new audiences in unexpected ways. The program includes the: 

Ocean Decade Exhibition – a touring Exhibition that illustrates the UN Ocean Literacy Principles
Ocean Image Bank – making great ocean imagery freely available
Ocean Phenomena Teaching Resources – image-based teaching resources
Creative Communication Toolkits – making key information more accessible

Art by Tim Helou for the Ocean Decade Exhibition

The Ocean Decade

A program of disruptive ideas to accelerate ocean awareness and action

Ocean Decade

The Great Fringing Reef of the Red Sea (a 50 Reefs site) is undoubtably one of the world’s most important reef systems – it might be the most climate tolerant coral reef in the world. It still has the potential to survive if protected.

We teamed up with UNEP and Egyptian NGO HEPCA to: 1) Raise awareness about the reef and its importance, 2) Get the reef recognized as a Mission Blue Hope Spot 3) Campaign for its protection, and 4) Use it to inspire climate action at COP27 with Singer Songwriter and UNEP Goodwill Ambassador, Ellie Goulding.

Great Fringing Reef of the Red Sea Hope Spot

Campaigning for the protection of one of the world’s most important reefs.

The Great Fringing Reef

One of the biggest issues holding back ocean conservation is its image - it is all too often negative or cliche and doesn’t resonate with a mainstream audience or policymakers. 

That’s why we teamed up with Adobe to launch a series of challenges for the creative community to help transform the image of ocean conservation, raise awareness about the importance of the ocean, and reveal support for ocean protection that’s impossible to ignore.

The campaign isn’t just about creating awareness, it is about creating real impact. Artworks from the challenges have been used to create the Ocean Decade Exhibition which we’ve been taking to influence key UN conferences and events. 

Create Waves Campaign

Teaming up with Adobe and the creative community to help transform the image of ocean conservation.

Improving ocean education is key to ocean conservation and is a major goal of the UN Ocean Decade. So, we teamed up with UNESCO and our creative partner, Adobe, and challenged the global creative community to reimagine how we communicate fundamental principles of the ocean. 

The Ocean Decade Exhibition launched outside of UNESCO HQ in Paris, France in 2021, at the start of the UN Ocean Decade, with nearly 100 artworks on display. Following its initial success, we took the exhibition to iconic locations in Lisbon, Portugal (to coincide with the UN Ocean Conference) and onto Geneva, Switzerland.

The Ocean Decade Exhibition has also been adapted into a digital exhibition, currently showing at the Florida Aquarium, and we are making it available to other aquariums and venues to inspire new audiences.  

The artworks have also been used to develop free education resources to improve ocean literacy thanks to the support of the UC Irvine Science Project. 

Ocean Decade Exhibition

A showcase of art to inspire greater ocean awareness and action during the UN Ocean Decade 

The Glowing campaign was inspired by a phenomenon we witnessed while filming the Netflix Documentary, Chasing Coral. 

Some corals glow in fluorescent color in a desperate bid to protect themselves from underwater heat waves caused by climate change. It is an indicator that we’ve reached a tipping point, not just for coral reefs, but for the planet – we are on the verge of losing entire ecosystems on which we depend.

Working with the UN Environment Programme, together with Pantone and Adobe, we turned these warning colors into colors that everyone can use to inspire action. The Glowing campaign challenges powerful brands and the creative community to use the three Glowing colors to amplify coral’s warning signal and demonstrate support for action. Through the involvement of celebrities and brands, such as the World Surf League, it has reached and influenced millions of people around the world. 

Glowing Gone Campaign

A campaign using color and creativity to inspire support for saving coral reefs.

The 50 Reefs initiative was conceived by The Ocean Agency during the filming of the Netflix Original Documentary Chasing Coral. It was developed in partnership with the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Tiffany & Co. Foundation and Paul G. Allen Philanthropies.     

The initiative had the ambitious goal of identifying a global portfolio of coral reefs with a good chance of both surviving the impacts of climate change and being able to help repopulate neighboring reefs. 

Working with some of the world’s top coral reef scientists, the study actually identified a greater number of reefs than had originally been anticipated. The study has resulted in over $93m in funding for the reefs identified and is used by the Global Fund for Coral Reefs to target investments.

50 Reefs Initiative

A global science-based strategy to save coral reefs adopted by leading funders

For three years, Emmy-winning filmmaker Jeff Orlowski and his team followed the work of The Ocean Agency in recording and revealing a global coral bleaching event and the impacts of climate change on the world's reefs, resulting in the Netflix Original Documentary Chasing Coral.

Chasing Coral has taken home numerous awards, including the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Peabody Awards, Outstanding Nature Documentary at the Emmys, and was even shortlisted for an Academy Award.

Chasing Coral

A Netflix film inspiring support for coral reef conservation and climate action

The Ocean Agency followed the Third Global Coral Bleaching Event from its start in late 2014, dispatching teams worldwide to visually record it. Using specially developed cameras, we documented the event with unique 360-degree imagery. The imagery produced, for the first time, has revealed the true scale of a global bleaching event to the world. 

Our team was there when the bleaching began in Hawaii in October 2014, and we chased it the world as it devastated parts of the Great Barrier Reef, American Samoa, the Maldives, New Caledonia, Japan, and back again to the Great Barrier Reef for a second record-breaking year in a row.

In September 2015, we teamed up with NOAA and Google to announce and publicize the bleaching event. We watched as it became one of the biggest climate-change stories in the lead-up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), reaching 2.4 billion people with a media value over $25 million. Our imagery has been used by virtually every major news outlet as coral-bleaching science has been publicized on an unprecedented scale.  

Revealing the Coral Crisis

Chasing an underwater heatwave to reveal its impact on the world’s reefs

In the age of virtual reality, education is revolutionizing. We've captured the 360-degree imagery needed to seize this opportunity, and we're teaming up with Google to deliver it. Using Google Cardboards, Google Earth and Google Expeditions, The Ocean Agency now offers virtual underwater field trips to classrooms around the world.

Millions of kids are able to explore the oceans as part of a curriculum-based learning program. The reaction of a class exploring the underwater world for the first time is one of the most exciting sights we've ever seen. We need to continue to inspire the leaders of the future.

Through Google Voyager’s collection of map-based stories, anyone, anywhere, can tour the underwater world or explore various ocean topics like sharks, seahorses and coral.

View all of our Google Ocean Education materials.

Google Ocean Education

A virtual reality ocean education program available to 90 million kids

Over 99% of people have never been scuba diving — and probably never will. This is a huge issue for ocean conservation. The ocean is a whole other world that most people don't know or understand. 

Our big idea was to take Google Street View underwater. Funded by our founding sponsor, XL Catlin, we developed a unique underwater 360-degree camera (the SVII design) capable of revealing the ocean on the Street View platform.

More people went virtual diving in the first week of its launch than have ever been diving in person. The imagery is the most-viewed underwater imagery in history (with views in the billions), and we're just getting started.

Underwater Street View

Teaming up with Google to make ocean exploration accessible to all.

If you're going to reveal the oceans, why not collect imagery that can be used as a valuable scientific record, too? We recorded reefs on a 'Google scale' that enables scientists to monitor change over time. The Seaview Survey is the most comprehensive survey of the world's coral reefs that’s ever been carried out.

In addition to XL Catlin (our main sponsor) and Google, we teamed up with The University of Queensland and numerous other scientific partners to create a way of surveying underwater environments that was more than 30 times more efficient than the traditional method. The new technology was so successful that it allowed us to create the most extensive standardized global baseline record of coral reefs, and we've made it freely available to all.

But it's not just great science — the project's outreach campaign has generated over $200 million worth of media exposure around the issue of coral reef decline. 

Catlin Seaview Survey

A groundbreaking photographic survey of the world’s coral reefs

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