With the world's oceans facing mounting threats from pollution, climate change and overfishing, the Obama administration held the first of several public hearings intended to help it draft a coordinated policy for managing the health of the seas.

Stanford University and Monterey Bay Aquarium and its research institute, with $25 million from the Packard Foundation, on Wednesday launched a new academic center that will focus not on the problems plaguing the world's oceans, but on how to solve them.