Seabirds have been the messengers of marine plastics pollution since the 1950s, not long after plastics began to be commercially manufactured. In the decades since, a number of multilateral agreements have emerged to address marine plastics pollution that have been informed by research and monitoring on plastic ingestion in seabirds. Seabirds continue to serve as effective monitors for plastics pollution in the oceans, and increasingly of the chemical contamination from the marine environment as plastic additives and chemicals can adsorb and accumulate in seabirds’ tissues. Plastics pollution has far-reaching ecological impacts, but the motivation for addressing the issue has escalated rapidly at the international level. Seabirds are also the most globally threatened group of birds and require concerted conservation actions to mitigate population declines from multiple pressures. However, most policy mechanisms focus on the monitoring and mitigation of anthropogenically induced stressors, using seabird data, and often fail to include mechanisms to conserve the messengers. In this review, we discuss how research on the impacts of plastics on seabirds is used to inform policy and highlight the competing interests of monitoring and conservation that emerge from this approach. Finally, we discuss policy opportunities to ensure seabirds can continue to be the indicators of ocean health and simultaneously achieve conservation goals.

This article explores the implementation of the Young Offenders Act in the most populous of Canada's ten provinces, Ontario. It argues that the original principles and programmes upon which the Act was based were not followed when the legislation was introduced. Research has demonstrated that rather than adopting alternative measures approaches which emphasise the special needs of delinquents, the approach is increasingly one of imprisonment. Increasing levels of investment in the carceral response has meant that community programming has not been implemented in any meaningful way. The Community Options Programme is described as a direction for future treatment of youth under the law. It is suggested that collaboration between social control agencies to co‐ordinate approaches is long overdue. The economies of community based responses on both the economic and human level are suggested.

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