Many Partners are scheduling events for 2007 and it's not too late for you to plan one, too! We highly encourage you to take advantage of all our resources and ideas for this event. Last year we created WorldOceanDay.org for the purpose of helping our Partners around the world participate in this global event. The Ocean Project will continue to track and promote events around the globe. Once you have made your plans please let us know by logging on to the World Ocean Day website and registering your event as soon as possible so we can help advertise it.

Innovative state government initiatives, long overdue federal fisheries reform, and the designation of 140,000 square miles of protected waters were among the highlights of U.S. efforts to reform ocean policy in 2006. These advancements were undercut by the nation's failure to commit funding and make desperately needed policy reforms for the long-term preservation of our oceans, according to the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative's U.S. Ocean Policy Report Card.

Humans can't live under water, so we tend to overlook the fact that most life on this planet exists not on land but in the oceans. "Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth's surface area but contain 97 percent of its livable habitat," says David Helvarg, author of Blue Frontier: Dispatches From America's Ocean Wilderness. Oceans provide approximately 70 percent of the oxygen that humans breathe (like plants, oceans absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen) and most of the water we drink (evaporation from oceans forms the clouds whose rain and snow fill rivers and aquifers). In evolutionary terms, adds Helvarg, humans come from the ocean -- our earliest forebears crawled out of the sea eons before our immediate ancestors, the apes, began walking on two legs -- which may explain why people are so drawn to it. Half the world's population lives within fifty miles of a coastline; going to the beach is the number-one outdoor recreational activity for Americans.

Homo sapiens could not survive without oceans, but you wouldn't know it from how we have been treating them. Climate change was the big environmental story of 2006, but the alarming state of the oceans was not far behind. Topping the list was a study published in Science that projected that edible sea life will completely disappear by 2048 if current trends of overfishing and pollution continue. "Our children will see a world without seafood if we don't change things," commented Boris Worm, lead author of the study, which found three years ago that 29 percent of fish and shellfish populations had collapsed. A separate report by the United Nations Environmental Program announced there are at least 200 oxygen-starved "dead zones" in the world's seas, caused by excessive runoff of fertilizers, sewage and other land-based pollution. Further worrisome evidence came from the central Pacific Ocean, where Greenpeace researchers took samples from a swarm of floating plastic that stretched across an area the size of Texas. Suspended in a stagnant vortex of currents, the plastic came primarily from mainland consumers in Asia and North America. The Los Angeles River alone flushes enough trash each year to fill the Rose Bowl two stories high, according to a superb exposé in the Los Angeles Times.

Perhaps most ominous, human activity is altering the very chemical composition and temperature of the oceans. Scientists blame increasing emissions of carbon dioxide. The oceans absorb much of this CO2, which is fortunate in one sense; otherwise, the atmosphere would be heating up even faster than it already is. But the extra CO2 is making seawater more acidic, which in turn threatens a cascade of disturbing consequences, including the destruction of coral reefs and plankton, tiny animals that are the foundation of the marine food chain.

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said. Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.

He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has decided to move the minute hand of its "Doomsday Clock" forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world. Scientists devised the clock in 1947 as a way of expressing to the public the risk of nuclear conflagration following the use of the atomic weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces," Professor Hawking said. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth.

Learn more about climate change at the Ocean Resource Center.

Learn more about the Marine Aquaculture Task Force.

Because of the efforts of the Concert for the Oceans Foundation over $250,000 is being committed to start to directly impact several million people. Already, 15 actions were announced this month that will begin immediately in over 50 countries affecting millions of people. It is expected that over 90 projects worldwide will be funded each year with similar or greater level impact.

Gallery topics include:
- Marine research and education
- Climate change / sea-level rise
- Coral Bleaching
- Fishing Methods
- Marine Pollution and Trash
- Deep-sea habitat
- Marine reserves/Marine protected areas
- Coastal development
... and more! Check out their photo galleries.