As the last territory on the earth, the ocean is the living space and treasure house for human beings. From a global perspective, World Ocean Week (WOW) in Xiamen serves as a platform for regional cooperation as well as for connecting marine and social science, technology, education, public awareness in making policies, management decisions and actions to achieve sustainable use of coastal and marine resources and for achieving sustainable development of the oceans.

The GEF IW Conference objectives are to facilitate cross-sectoral and portfolio-wide learning and experience sharing. It strives to solicit advice from the existing GEF IW portfolio on burning issues, and to assist in building participant capacity in key management and technical areas. Participants sum up progress achieved and also look to the future of programming within and beyond the GEF IW focal area.

ICMEG is an annual conference that presents current research being carried out in marine environmental governance.

This year's conference, ICMEG 2012, will be held on September 27-28, 2012 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. ICMEG 2012 aims to bring together researchers, scientists, and scholar students to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects of Marine Environmental Governance, and discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted.

Australia's biennnial Coast to Coast Conference is renowned for providing an excellent forum for all with an interest in coastal, estuarine and marine matters to meet and to share knowledge and experiences in the areas of management, science, policy, governance, advocacy and other related topics.

In fact it has become the most important conference for bridging the divides between the various sectors and making a difference. It has been successfully held every two years since 1994 at venues in different States around Australia.

The "Oceans of Potential" conference will bring together stakeholders from a broad range of disciplines to discuss these opportunities and to place marine science at the heart of an exciting vision of the future.

The dynamic growth of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region and its neighboring countries Japan, China and Korea (also referred to as ASEAN + 3) in recent years has increased the pressure on their natural resources. Human activities, the driving force behind the regional growth, threaten biological resources. Lack of scientific information on biodiversity in this region has affected the assessment and prediction of biodiversity changes, caused mainly by the lack of taxonomic capacity in data collection and analysis.