Wednesday 2 June 2010 - 11:30 – 13:00

The Marine environment is home to a major part of the world’s biodiversity, supporting a huge amount of productive ecosystems, specific habitats and individual species, which provide humankind with many services. Increasing human pressures and climate change are threatening to destabilize these ecosystems’ balance, and we run the risk of losing much of their biodiversity even before it has been discovered or well explored. This session will focus on the current state of biodiversity in oceans, highlighting major threats and the solutions contained in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive as well as the different approaches taken in various regional conventions (covering the North Atlantic, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea).