The role of art in coastal and marine sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability is a universal goal that requires balancing social, economic and environmental dimensions, and that applies to both terrestrial and marine environments. Several authors argue that arts are valuable tools to frame and engage with current environmental issues related to sustainability, including pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Accordingly, our research question is: what is the role of art in the sustainability of coasts and seas? We searched our research question on the two most important scientific databases of articles (Scopus and Web of Science) and retrieved 1352 articles. We narrowed the articles to 79 studies that actually address our question through screening. The dataset describes a variety of artworks from the four art categories (Literary, Media, Performing, and Visual) around the world, although the more frequent countries are the US, the UK, and Australia. We found that Visual Arts are more common (~40%), and engagement is a highlighted pursued impact (~40%) by these artistic practices. Other authors also intend to promote marine conservation and restoration, management, education, and activism. Only 19 articles of the dataset measured the impact of artistic activities on their audience. This subset shows evidence of art contributions to sustainability mainly through raising awareness, learning, and promoting engagement and enjoyment of project participants. Through this work, we set the current state of knowledge on this emerging topic, and argue that further research and new strategies of impact measurement are needed to thoroughly understand the effect of art on coastal/marine sustainability.

Creatively connecting science, society and the sea: a mini-review of academic literature focusing on art-science collaborations and the ocean

“…I also excluded articles which although had elements of art, ocean, scientists or public engagement, were not collaborations directly between a scientist(s) and artist(s) (column titled Related Articles in Table 1). I thus excluded articles from projects which use creative methods but did not mention any artscience collaboration directly (see Gebbels et al, 2012;Neilson et al, 2016), reflections on historical ocean art (Berta, 2021), ocean art reviews which focus on general ocean art rather than specifically on art-science collaborations (Radstone, 2017;Helmreich and Jones, 2018;Matias et al, 2023), articles which analyse art projects but the researchers who wrote the article were not involved with the project ( Van der Vaart et al, 2018), individual reflections by ocean artists which do not mention any scientifc collaboration (Nobel, 2015) and those projects that have yet to happen (see Parsons et al, 2021). In addition to these papers, others were read either from reviewing the bibliographies of those papers discovered through the web of science review, prior knowledge of research papers and books, as well as also what was recommended by colleagues and others in the field.…”

“…One such way that thinking under, through and with the oceans is being advanced in novel ways, is through the combination of the artistic and scientific worlds. Art has become an important tool in understanding coastal and marine sustainability (Matias et al, 2023) and so the coming together of artists and marine scientists has seen a rise in the past few decades, and with it, so has the number of academic articles and books published on the subject (Probyn et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2022).…”