The push — involving 80 countries and a projected $100 billion blue-impact finance value — forms the spine of the Global BlueRiverian Festival scheduled for June 7, 2026, which seeks to transform World Sustainable Ocean and Blue Tourism Day into a coordinated, multi-continental mass-participation drive for water regeneration.
Ambassador Justin Duru, President General in Council of the Afro-Caribbean Network Foundation, said the campaign represents a shift in the way humanity thinks about the ocean — away from abstraction and towards a shared value system that underpins livelihoods, culture, identity and planetary survival.
“The ocean is our planet’s heartbeat, and protecting it must become humanity’s shared rhythm,” he said, insisting the Festival’s model merges creativity, conservation and blue-economy innovation into one unified global wave of civic action.