Regional Scientific and Technical Capacity Building Workshop on the World Ocean Assessment (the U.N Regular Process); South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand; was conducted in Bangkok, 17–19 September 2012. It aims to build capacity in carrying out integrated marine assessments. The workshop utilized a methodology for a rapid regional ocean assessment and applied it to the South China Sea (SCS). The workshop included an evaluation of the assessment methodology and its potential effectiveness in producing a credible assessment, for the region and also for national jurisdictions. The participants used the methodology to produce an indicative assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem health in the SCS. The workshop methodology was based on an expert elicitation process – a process that synthesises the subjective judgment of experts across a broad base of evidence. Expert elicitation is essentially a scientific consensus methodology. In this case, the process consisted of three phases: 1) a pre-workshop review to select the assessment parameters, such as habitats, species and processes; 2) the choice of a reference point or benchmark (the year 1900) against which the assessment of current conditions would be compared; and 3) the development of a scoring system and guiding rules to be used throughout the assessment including definitions for the assigned condition and the definition of time frames, so that trends in the assessment of condition could be included (current was de- fined as the period 2007-2012 and future, 2012-2017.