Your timely editorial about the need to improve our knowledge of the ocean (8 August) rightly stresses the responsibility of political leaders to create the means to find out more about the 70% of the planet covered by the ocean. But it is not only in the physical, biological and chemical sciences that we must improve our knowledge. There are large gaps in our knowledge about the economic and social aspects of human interactions with the sea.

In 2002 the UN general assembly accepted the need for “a regular process for the global reporting and assessment of the marine environment, including socioeconomic aspects”, as recommended by the 2002 Johannesburg world summit on sustainable development. Implementing this immense and novel project has been a slow and, at times, difficult task.

Later this year World Ocean Assessment I will be presented to the general assembly. In 55 chapters, this reviews all aspects (environmental, social and economic) of the ways in which the ocean supports life, its role in providing food security, the other ways in which humans exploit the ocean, our current ways of studying the seas, the status of marine biodiversity in all parts of the ocean (including special studies of crucial species and habitats), the problems of assessing humans’ impacts on, and benefits from, the ocean and, most importantly, the gaps that exist both in our knowledge and in the capacities to learn about the seas and manage human impacts on them.

This will provide governments and intergovernmental organisations, both global and regional, with a common basis on which to take decisions on how to deal with the critical issues concerning the ocean, including filling the knowledge gaps to which you draw attention.

Alan Simcock

Joint coordinator, UN group of experts of the regular process (World Ocean Assessment I)

• You are absolutely right to focus on the plight of the indigenous tribes living in the Peruvian Amazon (Environment, 29 July). Unless President Humala puts the rights of these vulnerable people above industrial gain, we will see them eradicated by deforestation and illegal mining, and the biodiversity of the region greatly compromised. Making the Sierra del Divisor a protected zone will go some way towards honouring this government’s commitment to eradicate deforestation completely by 2021 and show its genuine commitment to the environment and our battle against climate change. It must act now.

Nigel Rosser

Charlbury, Oxfordshire