Save the Oceans, Feed the World: Oceana in Mexico needs your support to protect the oceans and marine life.

What We Do

Oceana is dedicated to protecting and restoring the world’s oceans on a global scale.

Our Vision

Oceana seeks to make our oceans as rich, healthy, and abundant as they once were.

Oceana works in the United States to win policy victories that will restore and maintain ocean abundance and biodiversity. U.S.-managed waters are among the most extensive national waters in the world, and Oceana is dedicated to making sure those waters are healthy and productive for generations to come. Oceana’s campaigns utilize grassroots organizing, in-house scientific experts and litigators, strategic communications, and political engagement to stop overfishing, reduce bycatch, protect habitat, curb pollution and increase transparency.

Oceana’s Solution

Oceana was created to identify practical solutions and make them happen. The good news is that we can restore the oceans to their former glory. Oceana is...

Campaign-Driven

We channel our resources towards strategic, directed campaigns to achieve measurable outcomes that will protect and restore our oceans to former levels of abundance. Learn about current campaigns

Fact-Based

We believe in the importance of science in identifying problems and solutions for the oceans. Read our scientific reports

Multi-Disciplinary

Our scientists work closely with our teams of economists, lawyers, communicators, and advocates to achieve tangible results for the oceans. Meet our staff

Oceana was established by a group of leading foundations — The Pew Charitable Trusts, Oak Foundation, Marisla Foundation (formerly Homeland Foundation), Sandler Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — after a 1999 study they commissioned discovered that less than 0.5 percent of all resources spent by environmental nonprofit groups in the United States went to ocean advocacy.

No organization was working exclusively to protect and restore the oceans on a global scale. To fill the gap, our founders created Oceana: an international organization focused solely on oceans, dedicated to achieving measurable change by conducting specific, science-based policy campaigns with fixed deadlines and articulated goals.

The Ocean Law Project — also initiated by The Pew Charitable Trusts — was absorbed into Oceana in 2001 as Oceana’s legal arm. In 2002, Oceana merged with American Oceans Campaign, founded by actor and environmentalist Ted Danson, to more effectively address our common mission of protecting and restoring the world’s oceans.

Since its founding, Oceana has won more than 225 victories and protected more than 4.5 million square miles of ocean. Find out more about how Oceana is helping to save the oceans victory by victory.