MANILA 01 September 2025 – The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) joins the nation in celebrating Maritime and Archipelagic Nation Awareness Month, or MANAMo, 2025. As Filipinos, we take pride in our maritime and archipelagic identity, recognizing the deep ties we have to our ocean and seas. MANAMo, commemorated in September of every year under Proclamation No. 316 (2017), offers a dedicated opportunity to reflect on this shared identity and to give importance to the maritime domain.
For this year’s celebration, we invite our Filipino community all over the world to work together for a sustainable, secure, and thriving ocean. The entire DFA, including all Foreign Service Posts and Consular Offices, will hold activities with the aim of increasing awareness of our country’s maritime and archipelagic nature. Through these activities, we hope to develop in every Filipino a shared sense of responsibility on the need to preserve our maritime heritage.
Under this year’s theme of “Nagkakaisang Kapuluan, Panatag na Karagatan”, we celebrate the ties that bind us as one maritime nation. Just as how both land and water come together to form an archipelago, it is our unity that serves as the bulwark through which our security and shared prosperity as Filipinos emerge and is nurtured.
We are not separate from our environment and we thrive together in meaningful co-existence. This is the spirit with which we work together with international partners and friends to address existential threats that recognize no border, such as sea-level rise, climate change, degradation of our coral reefs, and marine plastics pollution.
At the 3rd UN Ocean Conference last June, the Philippines actively participated in highlighting the need to implement UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 (“Life Below Water”), raise ocean literacy especially among the youth, preserve the marine environment, including through addressing marine plastic pollution, and uphold the primacy of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such is the Philippines’ unstinting advocacy that marine and maritime concerns, particularly the protection of the marine environment, will be a key priority of the Philippines’ chairship of ASEAN in 2026.
May this MANAMo month remind us that the waters of our maritime and archipelagic nation are our lifeblood, sustaining us through challenges and obstacles, and energizing us towards greater prosperity and development.
Sa ating karagatan ang ating kinabukasan! Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!
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