News

Presented at the 10th World Wilderness Congress (WILD 10), 4-10 October 2013, Salamanca, Spain

By: Demetra Orthodoxou, Xenia I. Loizidou and Michael I. Loizides

MARLISCO ‘MARine Litter in Europe Seas: Social AwarenesS and CO-Responsibility’, is an FP-7 funded project that aims to develop and evaluate an approach that can be used to address the problems associated with marine litter and that can be applied more widely to other societal challenges. Considering that marine litter is a key threat to marine habitats, species and ecosystem services, MARLISCO aims to achieve substantial benefits through better integration among researchers, stakeholders and society, ensuring a holistic approach and a collective vision for the sustainable management of marine litter across all European seas.

The project will provide a series of mechanisms to engage and empower key stakeholders. This will be achieved by organising activities across 15 European countries, including: national forums in 12 countries involving industry sectors, scientists and the public; a European video contest for youngsters; educational activities and tools targeting the younger generation; and exhibitions to raise awareness among the wider public.

One of the project objectives is to record best practices for the reduction of marine litter in European seas, and to analyze them in order to select those with the greatest potential to minimize marine litter. The 20 partners of the MARLISCO consortium identified best practices that are being implemented in their country or regional sea. The practices, which address the marine litter issue throughout its lifecycle, from product creation to use and disposal, cover the themes of prevention, mitigation and awareness-raising, and include a wide range of initiatives such as policy/regulation implementation, economic and market-based instruments, campaigns and other practices or actions.

The DeCyDe-4 decision support method (www.isotech.com.cy) was implemented as a robust process of analysing the characteristics of the best practices. An ‘experts and stakeholders panel’, representing key actors with diverse knowledge and interest in marine issues, participated in a structured workshop and used the DeCyDe-4-MARLISCO decision support tool, which was dedicatedly developed for the project, to analyse and evaluate the best practices across four criteria: Impact, Applicability-Exploitability Potential, Sustainability and Data/Info Availability. This decision support process resulted in the ranking of the practices and facilitated in identifying the ones with the greatest potential for reducing marine litter. The analysis of these practices leads to the following conclusions:

• A combination of initiatives is necessary i.e. policy and regulation implementation should be complemented by campaigns, practices and economic and market instruments.
• The involvement of main stakeholder groups through a participatory approach, early on, leads to successful practices.
• Integrated approaches that involve a wide range of stakeholders and with varied themes and initiatives can be very successful.
• Prevention is paramount to solving the marine litter problem but mitigation and awareness-raising actions are very important tools for raising social awareness and promoting co-responsibility.
• Innovative initiatives promoting social responsibility through citizen empowerment are becoming very popular.

All of the recorded best practices are available on the MARLISCO portal (www.marlisco.eu) together with supporting information such as photographs and relevant reports. The ‘what-to-do’ guide, a user-friendly tool for decision makers and key stakeholders to increase their effectiveness to reduce marine litter, will be developed.