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Measuring the State of the Oceans and
Coasts:
Guidelines for the Production of
State of Marine Environment Assessments and Reports
Based on Expert Elicitation
A background paper by GRID-Arendal
January 2015
1. Background
It is fundamental to marine environmental management that states have the capacity to
assess and monitor the condition and trend of coastal and marine ecosystems within their
jurisdiction. Undertaking integrated assessments can be expensive and time consuming,
but sound information is critical to understand the State Of the Marine Environment
(SOME) to underpin decision-making and achieve or maintain ocean health. Most
importantly, large-scale integrated assessments must not be overly biased by information
that is limited only to places or issues that are well studied, since this might result in
outcomes that are not balanced or properly represent conditions across the whole of the
area assessed.
Further, SOME assessments are a critical data source used by global assessments like
the UN World Ocean Assessment (
www.worldoceanassessment.org), or large regional
assessments like the ones produced under the umbrella of UNEP’s Regional Seas
Programme.
In order to support the production of the first global ocean assessment a series of
regional workshops have been conducted over the last 2 years to identify relevant
assessments, regional experts and capacity gaps. At the workshops for the SE Asian
Seas (Sanya City, China), the Caribbean (Miami, USA), Western Indian Ocean (Maputo,
Mozambique), the South Atlantic (Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) and recently the Eastern Indian
Ocean (Chennai, India), experts from developing states have articulated that, while there
is no scarcity of marine environmental experts, the capability to undertake SOME
assessments and reports is a major gap due to both the lack of systematic monitoring
data and proficiency in environmental reporting.
With the intention of exploring options to bridge this gap, regional and national pilot
capacity-building workshops have been held in Bangkok, Thailand, Sept. 2012 (Ward,
2012; Feary et al., 2014); Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Oct. 2013; and in Freetown, Sierra
Leone, Feb. 2014. The purpose of the workshops was threefold: i) to expose national or