Abstract

The increasing abundance and impact of marine debris globally and its associated problematic transboundary nature, have created the need for harmonization and coherence of marine debris management strategies among regions. In this context, a number of policies also referred to as action plans are promoted at a local and regional level and more recently, inter-regional collaboration has increased. These policies seem to share common strategies which also reflects the categorizations of marine debris management measures developed by Chen (2015) and Williams and Rangel-Buitrago (2019) including knowledge, preventive, mitigating, removing and behavior-changing Therefore, they constitute the framework within which marine debris reduction can be approached and monitored. This paper provides a proactive methodology for the development of a decision making tool based on seven (7) derived categories which aligns with the aforementioned categorizations of marine debris management measures. The method also includes a scoring evaluation against the categories and was applied to two regions within the Atlantic Basin that has recently agreed to inter-regional collaboration for tackling marine debris, including the North-East Atlantic (NEA) via the OSPAR Commission and the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) via the Cartagena Convention. The results highlight the need for improvement in prevention in NEA and removal in WCR, a proposed conceptual coherence model and subsequent opportunities for inter-regional cooperation. The tool can be adapted in other cases providing an opportunity for comparative analysis, highlighting similarities and differences among regions, lessons learnt and a list of prioritized interventions in the context of marine debris management.

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