What is BlueLightS?
BlueLightS is a Horizon Europe project strengthening the knowledge and skills of European children and youth to deliver ‘blue’ (river and seas) resilience and sustainability. The project collaborates closely with projects such as ProBleu, SHORE, PREP4BLUE and the UN Ocean Decade.
BlueLightS is rooted in the European Union’s “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030” Mission, supporting its ambition to empower communities, especially younger generations, to safeguard our rivers, seas, and ocean. By strengthening the knowledge and skills of children and youth, BlueLightS advances the Mission’s goals to build resilience, protect biodiversity, and reduce pollution across aquatic ecosystems.
As part of this wider Mission ecosystem, the Mission Ocean and Waters Implementation Platform (MIP Ocean) plays a vital coordinating role. MIP Ocean supports the European Commission by facilitating knowledge-sharing, communication, and technical assistance across the Mission community. This shared platform enables projects like BlueLightS to align their efforts, exchange best practices, and amplify their impact in achieving the Mission’s goals.
Our Objectives
- To create a one-stop knowledge hub centralizing blue education resources for all actors of the education system;
- To create a dynamic ‘blue education platform’ to share, discuss and grow the blue education community;
- To support the development of a robust network of European Blue Schools;
- To test methods for mainstreaming blue education in nine European countries;
- To develop a framework recommending which conditions must be met to allow teachers across Europe to bring the blue into their classrooms, thereby shifting responsibility away from teachers and onto the education system as a whole;
- To use these opportunities to increase the visibility of blue education resources and mainstream their integration into the European education system.
Read on for more information on our experimentation work, the framework of recommendations we’re developing and other expected results!
Experimentation
In December 2024, BlueLightS launched its experimental phase in nine European countries spanning across France, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Ireland, Finland and Sweden. Its core objectives include collecting information on the current level of implementation of blue education in these countries, and exploring and testing ways in which blue education can be upscaled and mainstreamed in each of them. This experimentation will conclude in October 2026 and will feed into the project’s practical recommendations.
Dive into our interactive map to read more about each country’s experimentation scheme!
Under construction, come back soon for more information!
The BlueLightS
Framework
The main objective of the BlueLightS framework is to demonstrate the added value of blue education and the conditions required for strengthening it within a wide range of different European educational contexts. For example, strengthening blue education can involve increasing the visibility of water literacy in national curriculums, but also mainstreaming water literacy in textbooks or teacher trainings.
Sign up to our knowledge hub to explore other resources and find out when the Framework will be published!
Become a memberExpected results
The full list of the project’s public deliverables is available on the knowledge hub and will, in time, include a report presenting lessons learned from the experimentation countries, an interactive e-training module on blue education, a strategy book on developing bottom-up activities, and much more!
Read morePartners
BlueLightS is made up of 16 partners covering a diverse portfolio of blue education projects, spread across Europe.
