What are Ocean Literacy Principles?

Ocean literacy is an understanding of the ocean’s influence on you—and your influence on the ocean.

AN OCEAN-LITERATE PERSON: understands the Essential Principles and Fundamental Concepts about the ocean; can communicate about the ocean in a meaningful way; and is able to make informed and responsible decisions regarding the ocean and its resources.

"Concepts were developed through a community-wide consensus-building process that established agreement among hundreds of scientists, educators, and policymakers about what every person should understand about the ocean by the time they graduate high school in order to develop an ocean-literate society"(NMEA, 2024). 

Overall, it has been established that there should be seven key Ocean literacy principles. Using the Ocean literacy principles MERC has made MOLO's MERC Ocean Literacy Outcomes, each of which is broken down into five key concepts.