We live on the land yet we often forget the sea. We forget that 70% of our planet is made up of coastal and marine ecosystems and that our coastal economies depend on these ecosystems to generate sustainable communities.

Many do not know that more than half of the carbon sequestered on the planet is attributed to marine ecosystems; our planet’s temperature is regulated by the oceans. We take them for granted as we do the fact that international trade in coastal and marine fisheries is a $70 billion a year business that drives coastal economies.

While we tend to focus on a plethora of terrestrial environmental problems over the last 35 years, we have neglected coastal and marine water pollution. The Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) of our planet that span the continental shelves and enclosed marine waters are warming, over-fished, and becoming ever more degraded with nitrogen.

This book represents the first attempt at establishing the baseline environmental conditions of the world’s LMEs and comes from a partnership among the United Nations Environment Programme, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, and the Global Environment Facility. Eighty percent of marine capture fisheries are taken in these LMEs where billions of people reside in coastal areas.

The satellite-based time series of warming of LMEs presented in this baseline assessment presents a stark picture. The trend of over-fishing of valuable and less desirable species of fish based on many decades of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us Project shows vast depletion of species in many LMEs to the point of overexploitation and collapse. The authors also found there is an increased trend expected for nitrogen pollution from land-based sources—this promises to create more dead zones of oxygen depletion and hazardous algal blooms that threaten human, ecosystem, and economic health.

We at the Global Environment Facility hope that the release of this global assessment will call attention to the degraded state of many coasts and marine waters as well as the high risk that human behavior is placing on loss of perhaps trillions of dollars of annual goods and services. We need to stop taking these precious resources for granted.

Monique Barbut, CEO Global Environment Facility