The East Asian Seas region faces serious transboundary environmental challenges to the sustainable development of its coastal and marine areas. Existing national management approaches are still sectoral and actions tend to focus on problems that are visible and of immediate concern, and are geared towards responding to environmental crises. Regional action plans have yet to be effectively implemented. This project attempts to reduce or remove the critical barriers (e.g., inadequate policy; limited investment; disparate institutional capacity) to attain effective environmental management. To this end, the project activities are aimed at enabling the sustainable development of the Seas of East Asia. PEMSEA envisions building multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable coastal development and improved quality of life for local inhabitants. The creation of alliances to address cross-boundary, multi-jurisdictional environmental and natural resource use issues is also being pursued by the project. Alongside all these objectives, PEMSEA hopes to strengthen capacities in the governance of oceans and coastal resources.

The project design is based on two management frameworks tested in the GEF pilot phase, namely: a) integrated coastal management, which addresses land-water interactions and the negative impacts of human activity; and b) risk assessment/risk management which focuses on human activities and their impact in sub-regional seas. The project integrates these two management frameworks, thereby providing comprehensive coverage of the marine and coastal environment, and the related land- and sea-based environmental issues. These activities, reinforced with appropriate coastal/marine policy and environmental investment options, will enable the deployment of a strategic approach to address multi-focal environmental concerns through a sustainable regional mechanism, especially transboundary environmental issues arising from population pressure and national economic development. This project is part of a GEF programmatic approach to the East Asian Region where multiple international waters projects are being targeted to reverse transboundary environmental degradation of the shared waters. The global environmental benefits to be derived from the project are the cumulative environmental improvements at the site, national and regional levels that will be achieved mainly through intergovernmental, interagency and inter-sectoral partnerships.