When Cultural Heritage Meets Environmental Crisis: Protecting Our Ocean’s Dual Legacy
Beneath the waves lies a silent emergency—one that connects humanity’s maritime heritage to the future of our one global ocean. The Ocean Foundation’s Ocean Heritage Initiative stands at the forefront of this crisis through a revolutionary flagship project that demonstrates that cultural preservation and environmental protection are not competing priorities but complementary solutions to the same urgent challenge
More than 8,500 shipwrecks worldwide contain enough oil and hazardous materials to cause environmental disasters that would dwarf recent spills, while simultaneously destroying irreplaceable underwater archaeological sites and war graves. These aging vessels, many casualties of the World Wars, represent a dual threat that traditional conservation approaches have failed to address comprehensively. Our groundbreaking partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Waves Group tackles these ticking time bombs through an innovative model that recognizes shipwrecks as both cultural treasures and environmental hazards requiring integrated solutions.
The crisis embodies a profound injustice: vulnerable coastal communities that played no role in creating these underwater hazards face the greatest risks from catastrophic spills and heritage loss. Through international workshops spanning from London to Malta, we’ve built a global coalition of experts developing the standards and protocols needed to address these dual threats before they become catastrophes, while ensuring those most affected have the strongest voice in developing solutions. Our work has already prompted UNEP to commit to developing new guidelines for wreck management, while UNESCO has recognized the urgent need for cross-sectoral cooperation in protecting maritime heritage.
The project demonstrates how heritage preservation can drive environmental policy, creating frameworks that simultaneously safeguard marine ecosystems and honor the cultural significance of these underwater sites. Where traditional approaches see separate problems requiring separate solutions, we see interconnected heritage requiring integrated protection—transforming ocean threats into conservation opportunities that preserve both our maritime past and marine future for generations to come.
For more information on our Ocean Heritage Initiative, see here.
For the call to action on Potentially Polluting Wrecks read the Malta Manifesto here.
Our road map going forward is to implement or foster the implementation of the 14 recommendations in the Insight Report, “Potentially polluting wrecks: protecting people and planet.” See our road map here
