Environmental and freshwater policies can be effectively driven by the consideration of equity and health

Oceans have many uses, and there are too many linkages among marine ecosystems and between the land and adjacent seas to review them all in this chapter. The First Global Integrated Marine Assessment (A/RES/70/235; Inniss and Simcock eds. 2016) and reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013) have provided recent comprehensive reviews of the state of the ocean. Therefore, three topics have been selected here that warrant particular attention – tropical coral reefs, shing and debris entering the marine environment. Several topics of emerging or particular interest – mercury, sand mining, deep sea mining and ocean noise – are also brie y considered.

The analysis in GEO-6 of environmental policies and their integration demonstrates the diversity of institutional and cultural frameworks in which policymaking takes place. The roles of law, values, administrative capacities, socioeconomic conditions, and so on, are important in how effective policies can be. The design of policies that re ect on this set of conditions is important.