South Africa has over 3,000 kilometres of coastline. Two oceans converge at its southern tip. Around a third of all marine species in its waters exist nowhere else on Earth. According to projections, a well-managed ocean economy in South Africa could add R166 billion to GDP and create more than 600,000 jobs by 2035.

So why, when most South Africans think about conservation or the environment, do they picture a terrestrial nature reserve or the big five?

The ocean is easy to love and hard to narrate. This World Environment Day, themed Climate Action, feels like the right moment to sit with that problem, because the communications gap around South Africa’s blue economy is not just a PR inconvenience. It is a real climate problem.

An economy hiding in plain sight

Coastal and marine resources contribute an estimated 35% of South Africa’s annual GDP when you factor in trade, shipping, tourism, and fisheries. Nearly all of the country’s trade moves by sea. The fishing industry underpins livelihoods up and down the coast.

And yet dedicated ocean communications remain one of the most underdeveloped areas of South Africa’s environmental media landscape. The stories that shape public understanding of the blue economy mostly live in policy documents, government department notices, and academic journals. They rarely travel further.

The protection gap, and why the story isn’t being told

South Africa currently protects 5.4% of its continental exclusive economic zone through 41 marine protected areas. The government’s 2030 target is 20%. That gap does not close on science alone. It closes because communities, businesses, and policymakers understand what is at stake, and that understanding has to be built, deliberately, over time.

Research into South Africa’s coastal and marine knowledge landscape has repeatedly flagged ocean literacy and public engagement as areas of critical weakness. While the science is there, the storytelling is not.

Meanwhile, the pressures on ocean health are not waiting. Africa loses roughly $24 billion a year to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Ocean temperatures are rising. Acidification is accelerating. The cold Benguela Current system, one of the most productive marine ecosystems on the planet and the foundation of South Africa’s West Coast fishing economy, is under documented climate stress.

Why ocean stories don’t break through

Simply put, land-based conservation is more accessible and highly visual.

The ocean works differently. Much of what matters happens below the surface, across ecosystems that researchers spend careers studying and communicators get a paragraph to explain. Marine spatial planning, benthic habitat, blue carbon sequestration, these concepts are real and consequential, but they do not arrive pre-packaged for a 60-second reel or a news editor with three minutes to decide.

There is also a structural gap between knowledge production and public narrative. South Africa’s marine science community is strong. But the translation layer, the communicators, the storytellers, the media strategists, are chronically under-resourced in ocean-facing organisations. The result is a default to technical language and episodic coverage when something dramatic forces the story above the waterline.

Climate action needs the ocean in the conversation

This year’s WED theme is a call to move from awareness to action. UNEP frames climate action in 2026 as not just about reducing carbon emissions, but about rethinking the systems that power our economies and repairing our relationship with the climate.

That framing fits the ocean precisely. The ocean absorbs the vast majority of excess heat generated by climate change. It has buffered humanity from far worse warming than we have experienced. Marine ecosystems are active climate infrastructure.

As the conversation around nature-based solutions grows, and as frameworks like the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures begin to push companies to account for ocean-linked risks and dependencies, the demand for credible ocean communication will grow with it. The question is whether the sector builds that communication capacity now, or scrambles to catch up later.

What the story actually needs to be

Good ocean communications is not about dumbing science down. It is about making the stakes legible to people who are not already paying attention.

It connects marine protected areas to the coastal communities whose food security depends on healthy fish stocks. It translates a degraded reef into a concrete story about dive tourism and jobs. It shows how a company’s supply chain runs through the same ocean it is not yet accounting for in its ESG report.

It tells the story of what South Africa stands to gain from the blue economy and what it stands to lose if that economy is built without conservation at its core.

UNEP’s 2026 campaign calls on all of us to step in #NowForClimate and help steer a world already in motion. For South Africa’s ocean sector, stepping in means investing in the communication infrastructure that makes public climate action around the blue economy possible.