Fibs, Fiction, and Facts: The Visual Construction of Ocean Sustainability Within the Context of the Climate Crisis

Public discourse from the media agenda on global topical issues, such as the climate crisis, often uses visual narratives to drive public engagement and climate action. These visual narratives come from a variety of sources such as images from stock repositories and are used by legacy media for their convenience to create issue attention. This paper argues that public engagement and political support on ocean sustainability prompts urgency and action, but only when people are more aware of the problems and have better ocean sustainability literacy. To critically evaluate the role of the media in increasing ocean literacy, we analyse how ocean sustainability is visually constructed and investigate the extent to which the visual framing of oceans and the climate crisis may affect public engagement with climate sustainability efforts. Getty Images is one of the core repositories used by legacy media to visually communicate the climate crisis. Findings indicate the visual narratives surrounding ocean sustainability on Getty Images fail to make a connection between threats to the ocean and human activity; promote a core message that there is no ocean crisis despite overwhelming data about the dire state of the ocean; and do not communicate urgency towards ocean sustainability actions. Discussing the concepts of ocean literacy and applying the theories of agenda-setting, visual framing, and visual documentary styles, we contribute to scholarship related to the coverage of visual climate crisis communication by proposing a framework for communicating ocean sustainability action that combines principles of visual documentary with climate crisis communication.