The United Nations has appointed three members of staff at The University of the West Indies, Mona to its Pool of Experts to assist in the production of a World Ocean Assessment – the first integrated global assessment of the state of the marine environment, including socio-economic aspects.
 
The members are the James Moss-Solomon Snr. Professor of Environmental Management and Director of the Centre for Marine Sciences, Dale Webber; Head of the Department of Life Sciences, and academic coordinator of the Port Royal Marine Laboratory, Dr. Mona Webber, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences, Dr. Karl Aiken.  Under the terms of their appointment, they will draft, review drafts and provide technical reviews of documents on the state of the marine environment for Jamaica and the Caribbean. 
 
According to the United Nations World Ocean Assessment website, oceans and seas cover over 7/10ths of the plant however, “until now, there has been no system to provide an integrated, world-wide view of what is happening to the oceans and seas and how they are used.  Following the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the United Nations set up a regular process to review the environmental, economic and social aspects of the world’s oceans and seas.  This is the “Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment, including Socioeconomic Aspects”.  The outputs will be a series of World Ocean Assessments,  aimed at providing  a “sound, scientific basis for decisions at the global level on the world’s oceans and seas, and a framework for national and regional assessments and management decisions”.
 
 
The Assessment will be conducted by an Ad Hoc Working Group of the Whole, comprising representatives of Member States, which has been asked to produce  the first global integrated marine assessment of the world’s oceans and seas by 2014. The Pool of Experts has been created to assist this Group of Experts in conducting the assessments and to provide effective peer-review to ensure the high quality of the outputs. The Members of the Pool of Experts have been appointed through the regional groups of the United Nations and will provide expertise in the wide range of areas and subjects needed for the World Ocean Assessment.