CELEBRATE AND EXPLORE
OCEAN WEEK VICTORIA
JUNE 2 - 11, 2023
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WORLD OCEAN DAY
Ocean Week Victoria is a volunteer initiative to bring our wider community together around World Oceans Day (WOD).
The celebration of World Oceans Day dates back to the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit. Here, a team from Canada's International Centre for Ocean Development (ICOD) proposed an annual Oceans Day to create a voice for the oceans, to empower those who live and work in coastal communities, and to strengthen the management and stewardship of the oceans.
Each year, the United Nations selects a theme to engage the global community. This year’s theme is “Revitalization: Collective Action for the Ocean—Shedding light on the communities, ideas, and solutions that are working together to protect and revitalize the ocean and everything it sustains.”
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge and respect the Lekwungen-speaking Peoples on whose traditional and unceded territories we work, plan and play, and the Songhees, Esquimalt,
T’Sou-ke, WSANEC and other First Nations peoples whose historical relationships with the land and ocean continue to this day.
We hope and intend that this shared Ocean Week Victoria initiative will grow and develop in ways that are respectful and inclusive of all peoples and cultures who come together on the southern end of Vancouver Island.
A Sign of Lekwungen, one of seven carvings that mark places of cultural significance to the First Peoples in Victoria.
OUR MISSION
OUR MISSION
To build community partnerships and support local events and activities that celebrate World Oceans Day.
The ocean means many things to many people.
We eat from it.
We work and play on and in it.
It supplies most of our oxygen.
We get our weather from it,
no matter where we live.
And it contains somewhere between
500,000 and 10 million marine species.
We, and all life on this planet,
need a healthy global ocean.