Now in its 13th year, the "NILOS Documentary Yearbook" provides the reader with an excellent collection of documents related to ocean affairs and the law of the sea, issued each year by organizations, organs and bodies of the United Nations system. Documents of the UN General Assembly, Meeting of State Parties to the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention, ISBA, ITLOS, Follow-Up to the UN Straddling Fish Stocks and Small Island States Conferences, Panama Canal, ECOSOC, UNEP and UNCTAD are included first, followed by the documents of FAO, IAEA, IMO, UNESCO/IOC. As in the previous volumes, documents which were issued in the course of 1997 are reproduced, while other relevant documents are listed. The "NILOS Documentary Yearbook" has proved to be of invaluable assistance in facilitating access by the community of scholars and practitioners in ocean affairs and the law of the sea to essential documentation. The entry of the 1992 UN Law of the Sea Convention into force on 16th November 1994 and of the Part XI Agreement - on 28 July 1996, and progress in the implementation of Chapter 17 of Agenda 21, make continuation of this assistance of particular significance in the years to come. The members of the "Yearbook"'s Advisory Board are: Judges Abdul Koroma and Shigeru Oda of the ICJ, Judges Thomas Mensah, Dolliver Nelson and Tullio Treves of the ITLOS, as well as Rosalie Balkin, Edward Brown, Lee Kimball, Bernard Oxman and Shabtai Rosenne.

Conventional management approaches cannot meet the challenges faced by ocean and coastal ecosystems today. Consequently, national and international bodies have called for a shift toward more comprehensive ecosystem-based marine management. Synthesizing a vast amount of current knowledge, Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans is a comprehensive guide to utilizing this promising new approach. At its core, ecosystem-based management (EBM) is about acknowledging connections. Instead of focusing on the impacts of single activities on the delivery of individual ecosystem services, EBM focuses on the array of services that we receive from marine systems, the interactive and cumulative effects of multiple human activities on these coupled ecological and social systems, and the importance of working towards common goals across sectors. Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans provides a conceptual framework for students and professionals who want to understand and utilize this powerful approach. And it employs case studies that draw on the experiences of EBM practitioners to demonstrate how EBM principles can be applied to real-world problems. The book emphasizes the importance of understanding the factors that contribute to social and ecological resilience —the extent to which a system can maintain its structure, function, and identity in the face of disturbance. Utilizing the resilience framework, professionals can better predict how systems will respond to a variety of disturbances, as well as to a range of management alternatives. Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans presents the latest science of resilience, while it provides tools for the design and implementation of responsive EBM solutions.

A counterintuitive and compelling argument that existing laws already protect the entirety of our oceans—and a call to understand and enforce those protections. The world’s oceans face multiple threats: the effects of climate change, pollution, overfishing, plastic waste, and more. Confronted with the immensity of these challenges and of the oceans themselves, we might wonder what more can be done to stop their decline and better protect the sea and marine life. Such widespread environmental threats call for a simple but significant shift in reasoning to bring about long-overdue, elemental change in the way we use ocean resources. In Future Sea, ocean advocate and marine-policy researcher Deborah Rowan Wright provides the tools for that shift. Questioning the underlying philosophy of established ocean conservation approaches, Rowan Wright lays out a radical alternative: a bold and far-reaching strategy of 100 percent ocean protection that would put an end to destructive industrial activities, better safeguard marine biodiversity, and enable ocean wildlife to return and thrive along coasts and in seas around the globe. Future Sea is essentially concerned with the solutions and not the problems. Rowan Wright shines a light on existing international laws intended to keep marine environments safe that could underpin this new strategy. She gathers inspiring stories of communities and countries using ocean resources wisely, as well as of successful conservation projects, to build up a cautiously optimistic picture of the future for our oceans—counteracting all-too-prevalent reports of doom and gloom. A passionate, sweeping, and personal account, Future Sea not only argues for systemic change in how we manage what we do in the sea but also describes steps that anyone, from children to political leaders (or indeed, any reader of the book), can take toward safeguarding the oceans and their extraordinary wildlife.

The public trust doctrine. Role of the states. Managing coastal development. National environmental policy act ...