ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some existing and emerging challenges in the conservation of the marine environment, particularly concerning the prevention of marine pollution and the protection of marine biodiversity. Studies focusing on the sustainability of marine resources have made the illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and overfishing or over-exploitation of fish, a constitutive part of their analyses. Even though land-based marine pollution is a relatively new area of ocean-related law, in the last decades it has been established as the most frequent and most harmful cause of marine pollution. Climate change presents overwhelming challenges to the ocean ecosystems. The contemporary notion of ocean governance supports stronger initiatives towards the responsible use of the ocean, and it has now been established as a collective process of decision-making, underpinned by the necessity to strengthen the ecosystem structure and sustain its functions.
