Over the years, the lights-off moment saw entire streets, buildings, landmarks, and city skylines go dark – an unmissable sight that drew public attention to nature loss and the climate crisis.
This year – amidst the current global circumstances – in addition to switching off your lights, we also invite you to raise awareness and create the same unmissable sight online, so that the world sees our planet, the issues we face, and our place within it, in a new light.
When it comes to the weather and climate, most of us think only about what is happening in the atmosphere. If we ignore the ocean, however, we miss a big piece of the picture.
World Oceans Day, which had been unofficially celebrated every 8 June since its original proposal in 1992 by Canada at theEarth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was officially recognized by the United Nations in 2008. Since then it has been coordinated internationally by The Ocean Project and the World Ocean Network with greater success and global participation each year.
Purpose
World Oceans Day is an opportunity every year to honour the world’s oceans, celebrate the products the ocean provides such as seafood as well as marine life itself for aquariums, pets, and also a time to appreciate its own intrinsic value. The ocean also provides sea-lanes for international trade. Global pollution and over-consumption of fish have resulted in drastically dwindling population of the majority of species.
The Ocean Project, working in partnership with the World Ocean Network, has been promoting WOD since 2003 with its network of over 1,600 organizations and others throughout the world. These groups have been working to build greater awareness of the crucial role of the ocean in our lives and the important ways people can help. World Oceans Day provides an opportunity to get directly involved in protecting our future, through a new mindset and personal and community action and involvement – beach cleanups, educational programs, art contests, film festivals, sustainable seafood events, and other planned activities help to raise consciousness of how our lives depend on the oceans.
World Oceans Day 2013
The World Oceans Day 2013 & 2014 theme is: Together we have the power to protect the ocean. World Ocean Day – The Ocean Project
For World Oceans Day 2013, the organizers are also asking people around the world to make a promise for the oceans. People can promise to change one thing in their lives that will help protect the ocean, and then upload a photo of them with their promise to social media- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, or Pinterest, making sure to mention #WorldOceansDay.
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