We develop unexpected and original campaigns that support and accelerate ocean conservation.

Projects

We launched #CreateWaves – a campaign to reveal the importance of the ocean and inspire support for action.

We’ve teamed up with Adobe to launch #CreateWaves – a new campaign to create powerful artworks that raise awareness about the importance of the ocean and the need for action.

Learning about the ocean has all too often uninspiring, so we’re challenging the global community to get creative and make it exciting. 

It doesn’t matter how creative you think you are – Adobe has helped make it fun and easy to get involved with a special digital toolkit.

The campaign isn’t just about creating awareness, it is about creating real impact. We’re taking the artworks created to influence key UN conferences and event, revealing global support for ocean action.

#CreateWaves Campaign

2021 marks the start of the Ocean Decade – a pivotal moment when our actions will determine the state of the ocean for thousands of years.

We took Street View Underwater — with Google

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

More people went virtual diving in our launch week than have ever been diving in history.

We made it easy for millions of kids to go virtual diving and learn about the ocean — with Google.

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

Tens of millions of students can now access our FREE innovative ocean education materials.

We developed a new funding model and surveyed the world’s coral reefs — with Catlin Insurance

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

We proved that sponsoring science could outperform a typical sports sponsorship.

We chased a global underwater heatwave to reveal the crisis facing coral reefs — with NOAA.

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

We were the only team in the world to record the entire bleaching event.

We brought home the coral reef crisis — with Netflix

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

The Emmy-winning film has helped tens of millions of viewers understand the coral reef crisis.

50 Reefs Initiative: A global plan to save coral reefs and a huge win for their conservation

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. Following the publication of the science, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced $86 million in funding — one of the largest philanthropic donations ever for coral reef conservation.

50 Reefs Initiative

Bloomberg Philanthropies makes $86 million pledge for conservation action.

Revealing support for action using color and creativity — with Adobe and PANTONE

We’ve lost over half of the world’s corals already, and the speed of decline is accelerating. It has become clear we need to be very creative if we are going to save them.

The Ocean Agency has joined forces with Adobe, Pantone, WeTransfer, UN Environment, the World Surf League and PADI, and together we are aiming to unlock the potential of the global creative community in rapidly attracting mainstream support for coral reef conservation. The aim is to create enough attention and excitement around the issue that it rapidly becomes a priority issue for ambitious policy support and funding.

The inspiration for the initiative came from the corals themselves. Some corals turn incredibly bright colors when under too much stress from ocean heatwaves and excessive sunlight. It’s nature’s most vibrant warning signal — a signal that we’ve reached a tipping point for the planet. But it is a warning that has largely gone unnoticed.

The Glowing campaign, launched in June 2019, challenged the creative community — and the powerful brands they work with — to use three attention-grabbing colors of climate change to amplify coral’s warning signal and demonstrate support for urgent action. 

Find out how to get involved at Glowing.org

Glowing Campaign

A global campaign using creativity to accelerate climate and conservation action.

We launched #OceanLeague — individuals, organizations, leaders and brands creatively showing their support for ocean protection.

2021 is being described as the Super Year for the Ocean because of all the key international events setting long-term policy targets for ocean conservation. This comes at a pivotal moment for the future of the ocean as vital ecosystems such as coral reefs reach a tipping point and face complete collapse. The stakes couldn’t be any higher.

The challenge is that ocean conservation rarely gets prioritized at the international level - the people campaigning for action are labelled environmental activists and are all too easily ignored. 

So we’ve decided to get creative and to reveal mass mainstream support for ocean protection at the events that really matter. We’re building on the success of the Glowing Campaign with our Creativity Partner Adobe and UN Environment Programme and challenging the world to join the #OceanLeague. Ocean protection just got a lot more fun. Get involved. 