More than half the world's population lives in coastal areas--a proportion that is expected to increase to 75 percent by 2025, according to Biliana Cicin-Sain, director of the College's Center for the Study of Marine Policy.

"These areas are some of the most valuable and productive ecosystems on Earth," Cicin-Sain says. "For most coastal nations, the coasts are an asset of incalculable worth, yet such population growth puts enormous pressures on these areas, which can lead to their irreparable damage."

To help protect coastal areas for future generations, the Center looked to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development as an opportunity to focus public awareness on the challenges facing the marine and coastal resources of the world and also on their importance in supporting life on Earth.

Beginning Aug. 26 in Johannesburg, the World Summit brought together more than 100 heads of state, national delegates and leaders of nongovernmental organizations and businesses to assess the progress made in the 10 years since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Rio Earth Summit was an important milestone--at it, more than 150 governments formally adopted a global plan of action, "Agenda 21," to address the environmental, economic and social challenges facing the international community.

Preparatory to the World Summit, the Center had a leading role in organizing the Global Conference on Oceans and Coasts at Rio+10, held last December at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The conference was crucial in establishing worldwide consensus on the current status of the oceans and coasts and in making recommendations to ensure that these resources would be protected for future generations.

"The results of the Global Conference on Oceans and Coasts indicated that, although significant progress has been achieved in the 10 years since the Rio Earth Summit, the ocean is overexploited, and many people in coastal communities live in poverty," Cicin-Sain says. "Participants at the conference generally agreed that the oceans and coastal areas are at a critical point, and immediate actions are needed by nations and governing bodies to protect this valuable resource."

The Center's accreditation by the United Nations also meant that it could take the recommendations from last December's Global Conference directly to the preparatory committee meetings for the World Summit in Johannesburg.

At these meetings, the Center advocated for placing the status of marine and coastal resources at the forefront of the agenda.

"As a student, it is an invaluable experience to be a part of these international negotiations that will shape national and global ocean policy for the next decade," Kevin Goldstein, a master's degree candidate in marine policy at the College, says. "Even though the other students and I are there to facilitate the proceedings from an administrative standpoint, our ideas are always welcomed, and some of the research and writing that we have done has found its way into formal U.N. discussions. It's exciting to be contributing to something that is so grand in scale."