Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about what it really means to be AWARE.
For me, it begins with paying attention. As divers, we experience the ocean in a way few others can. We return to the same reefs, coastlines and dive sites, and we notice things. We notice the shark we didn’t see last time, the coral beginning to recover, the fishing line tangled around a reef or the plastic resting on a seafloor where few others will ever see it.
When we pay attention, we begin to understand not only what is beautiful about the ocean, but what is changing — and where we might be able to help. Eventually, awareness presents us with a choice: we can simply observe what is happening, or we can become part of the solution.
That idea has been at the heart of PADI AWARE® from the beginning.
More than three decades ago, divers were already witnessing the growing problem of marine debris beneath the surface. They could see something most of the world could not. So we began asking a simple question: what if divers could do more than remove what they found? What if the things they were seeing underwater could help us better understand the problem itself?
That thinking ultimately helped build Dive Against Debris®, our flagship citizen-science program. Divers don’t simply remove debris from the ocean; they identify it, record it and report what they find. An individual act of stewardship becomes data. And when those observations are repeated by divers around the world, they can help reveal what is happening in places that are otherwise incredibly difficult to monitor.
Today, that idea is evolving again. PADI AWARE is working to ensure that the kind of underwater citizen science divers have pioneered can contribute to much larger solutions, including the global effort to address plastic pollution. As governments continue working toward a Global Plastics Treaty, we are advocating for methodologies like Dive Against Debris to be recognized as a meaningful way to monitor what is actually reaching and accumulating in the ocean.
Think about that for a moment. A diver spending part of a morning removing and recording debris from a local reef can contribute to something much larger than a cleanup.
Divers can be part of the solution.
And I believe we are only beginning to understand what becomes possible when we start thinking about the global diving community this way.
Imagine if every diver gave just one day of a week-long dive holiday back to the place they came to explore. One day restoring a reef, surveying sharks and rays, removing and reporting marine debris, supporting a local conservation organization or helping protect the coastline that makes that destination extraordinary in the first place.
Or, imagine giving one day closer to home by cleaning a river, lake or watershed, restoring habitat, joining a community conservation project or advocating for a place or species that needs a voice. Stewardship doesn’t have to begin when we put on a mask and fins. Everything is connected to the ocean eventually, and there are opportunities to protect it wherever we live.
Now imagine those choices multiplied across one of the largest communities of divers on the planet.
Millions of individual acts of stewardship, happening in communities around the world.
That, to me, is what AWARE Week is really about.
It isn’t simply a week of conservation activities. It is an invitation to become more aware of the role each of us can play in protecting the places we love, to pay attention to what is happening around us, to recognize that our actions matter and to choose to participate.
Conservation has never been the work of a single week. The environmental challenges we face were not created overnight, and they will not be solved overnight. Protecting the ocean requires people who are willing to keep showing up — through progress and setbacks, through changing governments and changing priorities, through moments when the scale of the challenge can feel overwhelming.
PADI AWARE has been doing that for nearly 35 years, and we are building an organization capable of continuing to do it for decades to come.
Our work is evolving because the challenges facing the ocean are evolving. We are finding new ways for divers to contribute observations that can help scientists and governments better understand our ocean. We are expanding opportunities to protect sharks and rays, strengthening our work on marine debris and building new approaches to coral conservation. But the idea underneath all of it remains remarkably simple: people protect what they love, and divers have an extraordinary opportunity to turn that love into action.
That is why I believe so deeply in hope-driven action. Hope isn’t pretending everything will be okay. It is deciding that the future is still worth working for.
Sometimes that work changes international policy. Sometimes it protects a reef. And sometimes it is simply one person deciding to spend a few hours caring for the place in front of them.
Every one of those choices matters. And when enough of us make them, again and again, they become something much bigger than any one action.
They become a community built to endure.
So during AWARE Week, I hope you’ll start by paying attention. Look closely at the place you love, whether that’s a reef halfway around the world, the dive site down the road, the river running through your community or the coastline where you spend your weekends, and ask yourself one question:
What can I do to leave this place better than I found it?
Then do that.
And keep showing up.
To me, that’s what it means to be AWARE.
Katie Thompson
Executive Director
PADI AWARE Foundation
