Describe JSP character encoding and its importance.

JSP character encoding refers to the process of representing characters in a specific encoding scheme, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, or ISO-8859-1. It is important to ensure proper character encoding in JSP to handle different languages, character sets, and special characters correctly. By using the appropriate character encoding, JSP pages can accurately display and process multilingual content and avoid issues like character corruption or misinterpretation.