 The world center of marine biodiversity is found in Southeast Asia, especially starting from Indonesia, the Philippines moving out towards Papua New Guinea. In those areas, fish diversity, diversity of mollusks are very high, yet in the coast and oceans of Southeast Asia, it's under threat due to a number of factors, including increase in population and plant industrialization, land use change, infrastructure development, and of course climate change and increasing coastal tourism and poverty of coastal population. As a result, large marine ecosystems in the region are progressively degraded in a span of over five decades due to the so-called IUU fishing or illegal, undocumented, unregulated fishing. In 2008, there was an assessment being led by Clive Wilkinson wherein his team noted that 40% of the coral reefs in the region are effectively lost and that's in 2008. 20% are in critical conditions and 25% are threatened. Only 15% of the reefs have low threat levels and these 15% reefs are found away from major settlement areas. In 2000, Southeast Asia has more than 4.6 million hectares of mangrove forests but between 2000 and 2012, about 2% of that was lost and the deforestation is occurring around 0.18% per year. Unlargely, what is considered now a frontier for deforestation in Southeast Asia is Myanmar. An old previous records of deforestation in the region did not factor in Myanmar and then also the sea grass ecosystem is an important part of the coasts of Southeast Asia. There are about 24 species of sea grasses in the region and it's also the center of sea grass biodiversity in the world. Yet, sea grasses are a map and they play important roles in ecosystems. So for example, in the so-called coral triangle region, sea grass-related productivity is an important part of the food security in the region. Now, we also have climate change and the primary climate change impact that will happen in the region is sea level rise. And sea level rise will be particularly severe on low-lying ecosystems, islands and it will affect a number of population in the region. Recent studies show that at 2 degrees warming will result in a sea level rise in the region of at least 0.30 meters. What's really needed is a coordinated regional and national response to do all these challenges mentioned. So that challenge of illegal and decremented unregulated fishing, to that decline in biodiversity, to the challenge of poverty in coastal population and to the challenge of climate change as well as marine litter pollution. We need first, with respect to problems of coral reefs, coral reef degradation, we need to support Asian member states to gather data on reef biomass to effectively assess whether existing efforts such as marine to protected areas are working. So far, there's no integrated and established way of gathering reef biomass so we don't actually understand how much is there and whether all the interventions are working. So that having that particular platform contributed to by member states would have substantial implications on how we assess and manage our coral reefs. The second is that given the important challenge and urgency of marine litter pollution, I think countries in the region should act urgently. That means they need to start discussing among themselves on how to effectively respond to the challenge of marine litter pollution because marine litter occurs when waste on land is mismanaged. So the first point of intervention should be to manage waste on land. The third one is that countries in the region should be supported in terms of achieving their targets, the so-called the IHC targets on the Convention of Biological Diversity, especially with respect to targets 11 and 14 on expanding the size of marine protected areas in the region because so far it's so low that countries in the region might not be able to meet their commitments on the IHC targets. So there has to be a regional effort to understand why countries are not meeting their commitments and supporting them so that the IHC targets are fulfilled.