1. Regional Seas

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This year, as in the previous year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many regional and global meetings had to be held online. Despite difficulties at both regional and global levels, organizations have resumed their work, also reaching important results, such as the signing of the Preah Sihanouk Ministerial Declaration during the seventh Ministerial Forum of the East Asian Seas Congress. (<https://eascongress2021.pemsea.org>) Over the past year, the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme (UNEP) supported the global Pollution to Solution action, which involves a global assessment of marine litter and plastic pollution. According to the analyses carried out, plastic represents 85 percent of marine litter, and, by 2040, the volumes of plastic pollution in marine areas could even almost triple. For this, several actions have already been planned at the regional and global levels to reduce marine plastic litter, including the Forum on the Multi-stakeholder Platform on Marine Litter and Micro-plastics and the Ministerial Conference on Marine Litter and Plastic Pollution, in preparation for discussions at the second part of the fifth meeting of the UN Environment Assembly, which is to take place in 2022 (UNEA 5.2 <https://www.unep.org/environmentassembly/unea5>).