Maritime safety and pollution 

You'd think maritime safety and pollution would be among the more manageable global issues. The subissues are easily identified, and the solutions should be within reach and affordable: for example, experiments with marine sanctuaries in the Mediterranean brought a suprisingly quick revival of seemingly doomed sections of the sea, with a surge of whale and dolphin populations. And it is global issue that has been the subject of some forty treaties and conventions. Yet the health of oceans remains an ominous, still open issue for the planet. Some rules are still lacking (there are no uniform definitions of hazardous waste, for example) and where they exist, outright violations are very common and the enforcement system very weak-as is the case for many of the twenty issues.