UNEP convened two technical workshops from 30 June to 4 July 2014 in Geneva which a NOWPAP representative attended together with other participants from individual Regional Seas Programmes and relevant international organizations.
The technical workshop on selecting indicators for the state of Regional Seas marked the starting point of setting a “core set” of indicators to be used by the Regional Seas to assess the state of marine environment, pressures, response, etc. A plan of NOWPAP POMRAC to develop of the Ecological Quality Objectives for the NOWPAP region was introduced during the workshop.
The visioning workshop for the future of Regional Seas was designed to get a preliminary consensus among individual Regional Seas programmes regarding their possible areas of work in the coming 5-10-40 years. After a few plenary and breakout sessions, four broad areas were agreed upon for the next 10 years (and probably beyond); a) ecosystem services (with focus on extraction of living and non-living resources); b) pollution; c) governance; and d) climate change impacts (including ocean acidification).
