What is Ocean Equity?

Ocean equity is distinct from equality. As Harvard Professor Martha Minow has explained through the words of a civil rights activist: “Equality is giving everyone the same thing; equity is giving people what they need.” Ocean equity, therefore, involves ensuring appropriate support and rights for people who have been marginalized by factors such as race, gender, class, or geography, and addressing the structural inequalities that shape their lives. In this sense, equity is not about treating everyone the same—it is about prioritizing those who have been placed at disadvantage.

Why is ocean equity necessary?

Marine conservation has long managed development and resource use by treating all parties “equally,” whether they are communities experiencing environmental burdens or corporations with substantial influence. Although this may appear fair, such frameworks often silence those who are currently harmed or who have been historically marginalized. Their voices and needs are overshadowed in struggles over power, resources, and decision-making.

In practice, this means that the very communities who have long cared for the ocean are expected to endure disasters, resource depletion, and pollution impacts on their own. Yet today, as environmental crises outpace our ability to predict or control them, the most essential knowledge lies in the lived experiences of people on the frontlines—those who have been responding to these changes directly for generations.

What is the goal of ocean equity?

Global environmental problems are not distant events. Even if they seem unrelated today, they quickly become realities we must confront tomorrow. The ocean is interconnected across the planet; it is nearly impossible to protect one part while ignoring the rest. The notion that one can safeguard only oneself by shifting burdens onto others is, in fact, the least realistic strategy in the context of the ocean.

Pursuing such a path leads to an empty future: an ocean where the communities who depended on it, the fish that sustained our tables, and the cultures shaped around it have vanished—leaving only “a vast blue expanse devoid of people.”