What Does the Ocean We Want Actually Look Like? Four Countries Offer Answers

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development set out in 2021 with an unusually ambitious question: what would the ocean we want actually look like, and how would ordinary people around the world describe it? A new pilot survey conducted across four countries—Australia, Fiji, South Africa and the United Kingdom—offers one of the most direct answers to date, revealing how communities with very different relationships to the sea converge on strikingly similar aspirations, even as they diverge sharply on who should be responsible for getting there.

The study, published in npj Ocean Sustainability, forms part of the broader effort to translate the seven outcomes of the Ocean Decade into measurable public priorities. Those outcomes—ranging from a clean ocean and a healthy ocean to a productive ocean, a predicted ocean, a safe ocean, an accessible ocean and an inspiring and engaging ocean—were deliberately crafted in broad, aspirational language. Policymakers have long struggled with the gap between that high-level vision and the concrete actions required at national and community levels. The pilot survey was designed to probe that gap empirically, asking respondents in each country to weigh, rank and describe the ocean outcomes that mattered most to them, and to reflect on how their own lives and livelihoods connect to the state of the marine environment.

Methodologically, the research team approached the problem as a comparative public-perception study rather than a purely technical assessment. Respondents were recruited in coastal and non-coastal settings within each of the four countries, capturing a spectrum of experience from communities whose economies depend directly on fisheries and tourism to inland residents whose primary contact with the ocean is mediated through media, food supply chains and climate narratives. The survey instrument presented the Ocean Decade outcomes in accessible language and asked participants to evaluate their importance, their current state of achievement, and the feasibility of realizing them. Open-ended questions invited respondents to describe, in their own words, what a desirable future ocean would look like, producing a rich qualitative dataset alongside the structured rankings.

Across all four countries, a clean ocean and a healthy and resilient ocean emerged as dominant public priorities. This convergence is notable because the four survey sites span vastly different socio-economic and geographic contexts: Australia and the United Kingdom are high-income nations with long histories of marine research and established management institutions; Fiji is a Pacific island nation where ocean health is inseparable from food security, cultural identity and exposure to tropical cyclones; and South Africa combines a major commercial shipping economy with persistent inequalities in coastal access and employment. The fact that pollution and ecosystem health topped concern lists in all four settings suggests that anxiety about marine contamination and degradation is not a privilege of wealthy nations but a shared, global concern.

Beneath that convergence, however, the survey revealed meaningful variation in how respondents framed the problems and their solutions. In Fiji, the ocean was most commonly described through the lens of subsistence and community: respondents emphasized fish stocks, coral reefs, and the ability of villages to sustain traditional harvesting practices. In South Africa, accessibility and equity concerns were more prominent, with many participants highlighting that vast stretches of coastline remain effectively out of reach for disadvantaged communities, both economically and physically. In Australia and the United Kingdom, respondents more frequently framed ocean issues around climate change, plastic pollution and the protection of iconic wildlife, reflecting the influence of well-established environmental campaigns and national marine conservation debates. These differences matter for policy: a decade strategy that treats public priorities as uniform risks missing the specific, locally grounded values that determine whether communities support or resist particular interventions.

The survey also exposed a persistent asymmetry between aspiration and accountability. When asked who should be responsible for achieving the ocean we want, respondents overwhelmingly pointed to governments and international institutions, while rating their own countries’ current efforts as insufficient. At the same time, personal behavior change—reducing plastic use, choosing sustainable seafood, participating in beach clean-ups—was widely acknowledged but rarely described as consequential. The researchers interpret this as a signature of what is sometimes called the responsibility gap in environmental governance: people want systemic action but feel individually disempowered, a sentiment that can translate into either disengagement or demands for stronger regulation. For Ocean Decade planners, the finding implies that communication strategies emphasizing collective efficacy—the demonstrable impact of coordinated action—may be more effective than messages that rely on individual guilt.

Another recurring theme was the demand for better ocean knowledge. A predicted ocean, in which forecasting systems inform communities about storms, fish migrations and hazards, resonated strongly in all four countries, particularly among respondents with direct maritime livelihoods. Similarly, an inspiring and engaging ocean—a public that feels connected to and literate about the sea—was seen not as a luxury outcome but as a precondition for the others. Participants repeatedly noted that people protect what they understand and care about, and many argued that ocean education should begin in primary school rather than arriving, if at all, through documentaries and social media. This is consistent with a growing body of literature on ocean literacy, which links public understanding of the ocean’s influence on human life to support for conservation policy.

The four-country design also allowed the team to examine how trust in institutions shapes expectations. In contexts where marine management is perceived as well-resourced and science-based, respondents were more optimistic that the Ocean Decade’s goals could be substantially achieved by 2030, even if they remained skeptical of full success. Where management capacity is thin or enforcement is weak—as several Fijian and South African respondents described for their local fisheries—optimism dropped and the emphasis shifted to international responsibility and finance. The authors argue that this distribution of confidence should inform the sequencing of Ocean Decade investments: building visible, local wins in under-resourced regions may do more to sustain global momentum than headline announcements at the international level.

As a pilot, the study is explicit about its limits. Four countries cannot represent the world’s hundreds of coastal and island nations, and the survey populations, while diverse, were not designed to be statistically representative of entire national populations. The value of the exercise lies in demonstrating that the Ocean Decade’s aspirational language can be operationalized into instruments that yield comparable, actionable data across cultures—laying methodological groundwork for larger, more representative follow-up surveys. If the decade is to claim legitimacy as a public endeavor rather than a purely scientific one, its planners need exactly this kind of evidence about what the public wants, how priorities vary, and where the greatest gaps lie between vision and delivery. The pilot suggests such evidence can be gathered rigorously, affordably and comparatively.

The broader lesson may be the most striking one: when asked to imagine the ocean we want, people in four very different countries describe essentially the same ocean—clean, healthy, abundant, accessible and understood. The divergence lies not in the destination but in the route: who pays, who governs, who benefits, and whose knowledge counts. As the decade approaches its midway point, the pilot survey offers both reassurance and a warning. The global public’s vision is coherent enough to serve as a compass. Whether governments, industry and civil society can convert that shared compass heading into measurable change by 2030 remains the decade’s central test—and the reason studies like this one, which hold a mirror up to public priorities, are likely to multiply as the deadline draws closer.

Subject of Research: Public perceptions of the United Nations Ocean Decade outcomes across four countries

Article Title: The ocean we want in the decade of ocean science:a four-country pilot survey

Article References: Lew, D. K., Thébaud, O., Hori, J., Andreotta, M., Boschetti, F., Haynie, A. C., Krien, N., Leonardi, S., & Makino, M. (2026). The ocean we want in the decade of ocean science:a four-country pilot survey. npj Ocean Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00244-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44183-026-00244-8

Keywords: Ocean Decade, ocean literacy, public perception survey, marine conservation, ocean governance, npj Ocean Sustainability, Fiji, South Africa, Australia, United Kingdom, sustainable development, ocean pollution