Kinshasa, June 8th, 2026 (CPA).- The ocean was identified on Monday in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as the source of more than half of the world’s oxygen, surpassing forest ecosystems, according to an environmental expert interviewed on the occasion of World Oceans Day, celebrated annually on June 8th.
“The ocean produces more than half of the world’s oxygen because it contains a blue lung known as phytoplankton, which is capable of generating at least 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe. In other words, the air it produces is an essential component of the atmosphere, which contains gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and carbon dioxide, as well as trace gases,” said Sylvain Mavinga, Professor and Doctor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Kinshasa. He explained that the ocean plays a vital role in everyday life worldwide by regulating and balancing the Earth’s climate system. Through ocean currents, it carries warm water masses to higher latitudes, where they increase temperatures, while cold currents moderate temperatures in equatorial coastal regions. According to the expert, ocean species are classified by families and number in the millions. Aquatic ecosystems are generally divided into three major ecological categories: plankton, nekton and benthos.
“Plankton is usually a mixture of small or microscopic organisms that are poor swimmers, such as photosynthetic algae, cyanobacteria, protozoa, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans and the larvae of many animals. Nekton consists of non-planktonic swimming animals such as fish, turtles and whales. Finally, benthos includes organisms that live attached to the bottom of aquatic environments, such as sponges and oysters, near the sediment surface like sea cucumbers, or buried in sediments such as annelids. Other species simply move along the seabed, including lobsters,” he concluded. The theme of the 2026 World Oceans Day is “Reimagining: Beyond the World We Know, a New Relationship with Our Ocean.”