Paving the way for collective Ocean Literacy initiatives in the Mediterranean Sea - EU4Ocean Workshop

We are all involved in communication, awareness raising, and capacity building activities to some extent. Carrying them out alone or with partners. For different target groups. Sometimes focusing on challenges and at other times solutions. Perhaps for the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, the part of the sea falling under the national jurisdiction of your country, a maritime sector or… a very tiny but highly important marine protected area.

So, what could be better than joining forces to develop and implement collective ocean literacy initiatives, combining our ideas, actions and resources? It is clearly a challenging task but one worth trying because more effective ocean literacy is one of the keys to delivering sustainable management of marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea.

This was the focus of our September 25th 2020 “Med” online workshop, which was co-organised and facilitated by ACTeon (coordinator of the EU4Ocean coalition), the coordinating unit of the Mediterranean Action Plan, its regional activity centres Plan Bleu (PB/RAC) and Priority Actions Programme (PAP/RAC), EMSEA Med and the BlueMed initiative. The workshop provided the opportunity to work interactively in small groups of interested and inspired participants, who came prepared to collectively build the most promising ocean literacy actions.

The outcome of the Mediterranean Sea-basin online workshop?

• 70+ stakeholders of the Mediterranean Sea basin started to build collective ocean literacy activities
• The first concepts of 10 (potential) collective ocean literacy activities were developed (e.g. advocacy campaigns targeting plastic prevention, developing a ´Meet the Ocean´ podcast series or developing blue challenges in schools)
• Feasibility and priority challenges to implementing the potential actions have been identified together and the building blocks of a road map (what to do by when) to realise these initiatives have been set out

Overall, it brought the Mediterranean community of practice on ocean literacy to life.

What´s next ?

The workshop is a first step: Concepts of collective ocean literacy initiatives that have emerged need to be transformed into solid proposals, building on contributions from all workshop participants and from the wider Mediterranean ocean literacy community.

Priorities will be on:

• Identifying connections with initiatives emerging from the thematic working groups of the EU4Ocean coalition
• Consolidating core groups of organisations ready to contribute and lead the development and implementation of the initiatives. Challenging, but exciting!

Interested in joining the wave? Contact p [dot] strosseracteon-environment [dot] eu (p[dot]strosser[at]acteon-environment[dot]eu)

Workshop documents

Workshop Agenda

Synthesis of the workshop

The presentations will be available in due course.

The workshop was organised as part of the EU4Ocean Coalition for Ocean Literacy. Further information on EU4Ocean is available on the website.