A workshop co-sponsored by the IUCN and held in Oxford, UK earlier this year, has concluded that the threats facing the world’s oceans are actually far more serious than previously thought. The State of the Ocean panel included 27 participants from 18 organisations based in 6 different countries and produced:

”* A grave assessment of current threats — and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world’s ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history*”

The report produced by the workshop is one of the first to take a multi disciplinary approach and tried to calculate the cumulative effects of all the threat to the oceans, including warming, acidification, and overfishing. The conference delegates called “urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health). Image from Shutterstock.