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The ocean on which Earth depends for relatively predictable weather, temperature and provisioning of goods and services is now changing more rapidly than it has for millions of years.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are areas of the ocean set aside for long-term conservation aims.| MPAs support climate change adaptation and mitigation while providing other ecosystem services.| Currently 6.35% of the ocean is protected, but only just over 1.89% is covered by exclusively no-take MPAs.| Most existing MPAs do not have enough human and financial resources to properly implement conservation and management measures.| Increased political commitments can help boost the governance of and resources available to MPAs.

There are opportunities to capture more experience from initiatives at the local level, which can support objectives of the NBSAP and strengthen national reporting. Further research on gender and biodiversity can usefully build on the knowledge base on gender and environment themes, and gender and climate change in particular. Research and sharing of experience are also needed to promote and strengthen understanding and awareness of the relevance of gender to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use in the nation context.

Ocean warming may well turn out to be the greatest hidden challenge of our generation. Whilst some may be aware of the challenges a warming ocean presents to coral reefs, few know about the other consequences this holds for the ocean. Ocean acidification emerged as a new story around 2004, with problems already being encountered due to changes in ocean chemistry, and yet add ocean warming and there is a far bigger story to tell. In this report, we assess the scale of the challenge and explore this issue from a range of different perspectives – oceanography, ecosystems and species. We also look at the impacts ocean warming might have on the every-day benefits we derive from the ocean – its ‘goods and services’. This is a very timely report. We know the ocean is warming. Until very recently, the debate on climate change has focused on specific themes such as land surface temperatures, melting ice caps in Greenland and Polar Regions, and shrinking glaciers in mountain ranges. It has only occasionally mentioned the ocean. When the ocean was included, the issues discussed generally related to dramatic changes to coral reefs, as we have seen in 2016 when water temperature rises turning beautifully-coloured reefs a ghostly white from bleaching.

In response to the increasing impact of climate change, countries in the Pacific have implemented a number of climate change adaptation measures over the last two decades. These range from activities that focus on mainstreaming climate change into national and sectoral level policies, plans and strategies to actual on the ground projects. This range of work implemented also includes a number of climate and weather related disaster risk management (DRM) initiatives and projects that may not explicitly been categorised as CCA (Figure 1).

This book is one of the main contributions of the Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to the international discussions on how we should address climate change impacts on natural and human systems, including ecosystems and the services they provide to society and communities. It was produced through contributions of CEM members worldwide and those from other scientists with key experience in research on, and implementation of climate change adaptation measures. Eleven case studies were selected by a team of editors, covering different ecosystems and regions around the world.

The estimated 500 million people who depend on coral reefs worldwide regularly contend with change (Wilkinson 2008). Whether it is the shifting demands of a global marketplace, political upheaval at the national level, shortage of local supplies such as fuel, or fickle weather, the resilience of reefdependent people is often put to the test (Cinner et al. 2009d; Hughes et al. 2005a). Despite this hard-earned resilience, coastal communities and reef-based industries are going to be challenged like never before as climate change exerts a multi-faceted influence (Howden et al. 2007; IPCC 2007). The scale and rate of environmental change driven by increases in concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is unprecedented in human history, leading in the next few decades to significant – and in many cases dramatic – alterations in the availability and quality of ecosystem goods and services provided by coral reefs (IPCC 2007, Tonn, 2007, McClanahan et al. 2008)

Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) integrates the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services into an overall strategy to help people adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change. It includes the sustainable management, conservation and restoration of ecosystems to provide services that help people adapt to both current climate variability, and climate change1. Ecosystem-based Adaptation contributes to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience to both climate and non-climate risks and provides multiple benefi ts to society and the environment.

The IUCN Environmental Law Programme (ELP) sends this book to print just weeks before Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to finalize a new climate agreement to replace or supplement the Kyoto Protocol. Perhaps the best-developed of the new options expected in that agreement, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) poses a unique opportunity for the world to simultaneously ‘get things right’ for both climate and forests. In recent years, policy research has grown rapidly in the area of options for designing and implementing REDD regimes, while far less analysis of the legal ramifications of such options has occurred. This is particularly the case at the national level, where perhaps the greatest need for legal and policy understanding relating to REDD is felt already. It is this gap that the ELP aims to address with its latest publication.

As environmental problems continue to increase at an ever more rapid rate, exacerbated by the major threat of global climate change, the need for widespread remedial action is becoming ever more pressing. Scientific consensus on both the root causes of these problems and the measures required to tackle them is growing, while mass media and public interest has reached fever pitch. Of course, while this has put pressure on decisionmakers to take positive action, the realisation of the gravity and extent of the environmental problems has encouraged all those concerned about the state of our world to search for partners around it: one such significant partnership to e­merge in recent years is between those concerned with the conservation of nature –and of its biodiversity– and the custodians of sacred sites, representing both indigenous beliefs and mainstream faiths.