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Regardless of where we live, all of us depend upon healthy ocean ecosystems: either as a source of food or revenue, or as a key shaper and regulator of climate and weather. This dependency and the need to embrace sustainable development led nations of the world to agree to a series of high-level political commitments for marine conservation and marine protected areas. The World Summit on Sustainable Development, the 5th World Parks Congress, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the G8 Group of Nations have all called for the establishment of a global system of marine protected area (MPA) networks by the year 2012. In line with this commitment are strategies of marine conservation organizations and some governments to increase the development, use and effective management of MPAs as a tool for marine conservation across the oceans.

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.

Over two-thirds of the world’s surface is covered by water. Open oceans, semi-enclosed or enclosed seas, coastal areas, estuaries, rivers and lakes are host to highly diverse ecosystems that span all of earth’s climatologic zones. The productivity of these ecosystems has largely shaped development of human society and led to human settlement along coastal margins. Globally, the number of people living within 100 km of the coast increased from ca 2 billion in 1990 to 2.2 billion in 1995, or 39 percent of the world’s population (WRI 2006). The number continues to increase.