The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) is an intergovernmental marine science organization, meeting societal needs for impartial evidence on the state and sustainable use of our seas and oceans. The goal is to advance and share scientific understanding of marine ecosystems and the services they provide and to use this knowledge to generate state-of-the-art advice for meeting conservation, management, and sustainability goals. ICES WGSOCIAL is working to identify and report on social indicators and data gaps that point to priorities for data collection, research, institutional needs, and training in all member countries; and where possible propose systems to collect missing data. These ICES WGSOCIAL efforts will support the provision of social indicators to complement economic and ecological ones and enhance the quality of ecosystem assessments, including integrated ecosystem assessments.
