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BLUE PIVOT REPORT: RECOMMENDATIONS FROM LCAW 2026

Introduction At Nature Day during London Climate Action Week 2026 Nicola Bridge, from the Ocean Conservation Trust, and Natalie Hart, from Communications INC hosted a panel discussion called ‘The Blue Pivot’. PANEL LINEUP

Nicola Bridge

Natalie Hart

The event explored how to reposition the ocean from a niche environmental issue to a societal necessity by leveraging creativity, culture, and storytelling to bridge the human-ocean disconnect. The goal was to move forward the integration of ocean literacy, strategic communication and societal engagement through culture in the ocean space by generating a set of specific recommendations from the panel’s shared expertise.

SPEAKERS Suzanne Dhaliwal Laura McCutcheon Emily Renshaw-Smith

Page 2 Image Credit: Joe Short

The following 6 recommendations in this Blue Pivot report were developed from the conversations at the panel 2

Prioritise the value of attention, not just reach It can be difficult to have a lasting impact on audiences. In a communications landscape that is faced with generative AI, eroding public trust, and audiences facing multiple crises, much content fights to grab people for short sharp bursts. While social media campaigns are optimised for reach and impressions, this does not necessarily translate into a lasting effect. Focusing on culture, with formats that hold attention for longer, creates space to invest in types of storytelling that build depth and connection, and thereby have greater potential to move people.

RECOMMENDATION Aim to support and further the integration of ocean issues into more long-form and slowerburn formats, for example entertainment television, documentaries, literature, theatre and immersive experiences. Significant progress on this front is already being made within the climate space and some ocean projects, but there is room for more. Longer formats give storytellers and audiences room to sit with and develop an issue rather than compress it into a few seconds for a social media reel. Such longer form content has to work hard to gain and sustain attention, but it can offer greater potential for emotional engagement, nuanced explorations of a topic, and space for audiences to have genuinely enriching, positive experiences.

Develop & invest in programmes that target actors in multiple points of the cultural ecosystem

The challenge isn’t necessarily a shortage of good ocean stories, but rather a shortage of people across the cultural pipeline or ecosystem who understand why ocean-related stories matter enough to resource, prioritise or celebrate them. In order to better integrate ocean issues into the cultural sphere and thereby the wider public consciousness, work needs to be done to target agents of cultural change beyond just the storytellers. There is also a need to engage other people in the cultural pipeline, e.g. those who decide whether a story is written, made, backed, disseminated or seen. An ocean-related television show, for example, depends on a commissioning editor taking a risk, a streaming platform prioritising it in a crowded catalogue, and a marketing budget that makes it findable to audiences. Beyond a writer, a book still depends on an agent to believe in it, a commissioning editor and publisher envisioning a market for it, and bookshops choosing to stock it. And once a piece of cultural work exists, it depends on critics, reviewers, festivals and podcast hosts treating it as something worth attention, rather than considering it as a niche.

RECOMMENDATION Develop projects that target and engage the whole cultural ecosystem, not just the storytellers, by extending investment and relationship-building into (for example) commissioning editors, publishers, agents, platform curators, marketing and distribution teams, funders, and the critics and tastemakers who shape what gets culturally legitimised. This should include creating early, low-stakes entry points for mainstream (non-specialist) creative talent to engage with ocean issues, rather than treating talent development as something that only happens within the environmental sector. Building relationships and understanding across this ecosystem gives ocean stories a fairer chance of being made, backed and recognised.

Invest in cultural projects that have multi-channel interventions

Impact rarely comes from one channel doing one thing well, but rather it comes from a single body of work designed to move through multiple levels of society at once. Open Planet's three-tier model shows what this looks like in practice: driving mass culture through cinema and streaming distribution, taking a targeted cut directly into policy rooms (a 20-minute edit delivered to Number 10, MPs and the UN), and open-sourcing raw footage via openplanet.org so grassroots communities can build their own local campaigns from the same material. Dirty Business achieved something similar by pairing its broadcast with a physical activation (statues on London's Southbank) that pushed the story out of the TV schedule and into a House of Commons debate with the Water Minister. This kind of multi-tier design has to be built in from the start, not retrofitted once a mass-culture piece already exists.

RECOMMENDATION Design and fund projects as multi-point interventions from the outset, pairing massculture distribution with a targeted policy cut and open, adaptable assets that grassroots and local campaigners can use in their own context. Build the budget and timeline for this coordination into the commissioning process itself, rather than treating policy and grassroots activation as an afterthought once the main piece has been made.

Build an evidence base that points to cumulative impact Cultural change is a slow-moving process. It is often achieved not by one story, or product, or piece of art, but by multiple different efforts all working in the same direction. In order for funders and policymakers to back these kinds of approaches with confidence, they need to be able to see the cumulative picture of improvement and shifts within society, not just isolated wins. There are now some nationally representative datasets that show thoughts and feelings towards the ocean, through the Ocean and Society Survey, but there isn’t a shared framework that shows how cultural connection to the ocean builds across time and across interventions. Most organisations and projects report on their own terms, making it harder to see the field as a whole. Of course there is a risk to a framework like this, i.e. reducing something as rich and textured as cultural connection into a series of indicators that might flatten the nuance this work depends upon, but if done carefully it could be a resource that raises the profile of cultural investment across the sector.

RECOMMENDATION Beginning with England, test the development of a National Ocean Culture Framework with a shared set of indicators (e.g. attention, sentiment, behaviour, participation, political salience) that different organisations can report into consistently, so cumulative impact can be tracked across campaigns, sectors and years rather than assessed project by project. The framework should be built collaboratively with the organisations expected to use it, so it reflects how change actually happens rather than what is easiest to measure.

Keep making the case that ocean and society connection de-risks other ocean investments

Image Credit: Joe Short

Fundamental to the championing of this peoplecentric approach is the belief that a society genuinely connected to the ocean de-risks the investments, technologies and policy changes ocean recovery depends on. Public understanding and buy-in reduce political and reputational risk, ease adoption, and create the demand-side conditions that make capitalintensive ocean solutions viable in the first place. However, it is important to note that this argument is currently a compelling narrative rather than a quantified argument. Correlation between cultural connection and reduced investment risk is intuitive, but the causal chain (e.g. from cultural interventions, to public sentiment, to an investor or policymaker's decision) is hard to isolate and easy to overstate. The case will become stronger the more specific and evidenced it becomes.

RECOMMENDATION Continue building this evidence base deliberately for investors, funders and policymakers, using tools such as case studies, the Ocean and Society survey and a National Ocean Culture Framework to demonstrate the link between cultural investment and reduced risk in ocean finance, technology deployment and policy delivery. Where the evidence is still emerging, it is ok to state this. The argument holds more weight when precision is possible about what is proven and what evidence bases are still being developed.

Value culture as a way to build connection, not just deliver a message Some earlier recommendations in this paper focus on how ocean stories can be resourced, distributed, evidenced and measured against specific outcomes. This is necessary work, and formats such as documentaries can be highly effective at carrying a specific message. However, some cultural work doesn't set out to communicate a specific point about the ocean at all; instead, it builds a felt, personal sense of connection between an individual and the sea, or between an individual and the issues it faces. That connection is nuanced and different for everyone who experiences it. It can't easily be reduced to a message, because its value lies precisely in not being a message, i.e in the space it leaves for someone to arrive at their own relationship with the ocean, in their own way. This kind of connection may well be the foundation the rest of this report's recommendations depend on, since people who feel connected to the ocean are more receptive to the campaigns, evidence and policy asks built on top of that connection.

RECOMMENDATION Alongside investment in message- or outcomeled cultural interventions such as documentaries, value and fund ocean-related art and storytelling for its capacity to build individual, felt connection to the ocean, distinct from its capacity to carry or land a specific message. This means resisting the instinct to ask what a piece of work is trying to say or achieve, and being willing to fund and champion work on the basis of the connection it creates instead. Recognise that this connective value is often diffuse, delayed and different for each audience member, and that this is a feature of how it works, not a gap in the evidence.

Taken together, these recommendations point to the same underlying shift: moving the ocean from a niche issue communicated to audiences, to a societal necessity felt and shared by them. That means treating culture as genuine infrastructure for connection, which needs investment, a cultural ecosystem willing to back it, shared evidence of its cumulative effect, and room to hold value that isn't reducible to a message at all. Off the back of this paper, the Ocean Conservation Trust and Communications INC will be considering how to embed culture more deliberately into our own programming, how to develop a National Ocean Culture Framework for England, and how we can collaborate with new partners on projects that target the wider cultural ecosystem, beyond and including storytellers. If you are already doing the work reflected in the recommendations here, or are interested in taking any of the recommendations further, please get in touch with natalie@communicationsinc.co.uk and nicola.bridge@oceanconservationtrust.org.