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 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

Minerals are non-renewable resources (at least within human timeframes) but mining them is now apparently a sustainable enterprise, not a one-way street of exploitation. ISA provides an international and transparent forum to regulate and manage all mineral resources related activities and ensure protection of the marine environment in the “Area”, the deep seabed and subsoil beyond national jurisdiction, for the benefit of all humanity.

 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

GEBCO's aim is to provide the most authoritative publicly-available bathymetry of the world's oceans. It operates under the joint auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization(IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) (of UNESCO).

GEBCO produces and makes available a range of bathymetric data sets and products. This includes a global bathymetric grid; gazetteer of undersea feature names, a Web Map Service and printable maps of ocean bathymetry.

 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

Current State of Knowledge of Cetacean Threats, Diversity and Habitats in the Pacific Islands Region

 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

Summary table of the status of Pacific Island countries in relation to International and Regional conventions.

 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

Conservation International, GRID-Arendal and Geoscience Australia recently collaborated to produce a map of the global distribution of seafloor geomorphic features. The global seafloor geomorphic features map represents an important contribution towards the understanding of the distribution of blue habitats. Certain geomorphic feature are known to be good surrogates for biodiversity. For example, seamounts support a different suite of species to abyssal plains.

 Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme

This dataset shows the global distribution of seamounts and knolls identified using global bathymetric data at 30 arc-sec resolution. A total of 33,452 seamounts and 138,412 knolls were identified, representing the largest global set of identified seamounts and knolls to date. Seamount habitat was found to constitute approximately 4.7% of the ocean floor, whilst knolls covered 16.3%.

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme, and from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).