Understanding and exploring ocean literacy in South Africa: an initial assessment

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in human-ocean relationships and the role that understanding these can play in ensuring sustainable ocean futures. Once a concept on the periphery of ocean governance, ocean literacy has become an integral component of ocean discourse and governance. Historically grounded in marine education, ocean literacy has undergone a significant evolution moving beyond its educational roots and individual knowledge development to an effort that seeks ocean literacy as a societal outcome. While interest in ocean literacy has increased, knowledge and research gaps remain, including a tendency for most research being carried out in the Global North. This paper recognises this gap and seeks to address the geographical biases inherent within ocean literacy research, presenting the first assessment of ocean literacy across South Africa. Using an online questionnaire (n=549), this study explored multiple dimensions of ocean literacy, gathering crucial insights into human-ocean relationships in a South African context. Analysis found there to be high levels of concern for the marine environment, with plastic pollution/litter (73%) and overfishing (72%) identified as the leading threats facing South Africa’s ocean, while over 98% of respondents indicated that protecting the marine environment was important to them personally. Through the paper, we explore each of the ocean literacy dimensions, including ‘emoceans’ and emotional responses to the ocean, access and experience, trust, and more. While this study cannot be considered an exhaustive, whole of society, evaluation of ocean literacy in South Africa, and recognising ongoing discourse around the suitability of the concept outside of its Global North origins, the paper presented here contributes valuable insights, adding to the global evidence and understanding of ocean literacy and addressing evidence and knowledge gaps.