This year, we celebrate the World Environment Day in a very special way, holding a two-day workshop on marine waste data collection, organized by the ECOSS project in cooperation with Ocean Conservancy, which resulted in the establishment of the “Blue Network” – coordination of organizations that actively deal with the issue of marine litter in Croatia!

 

The Blue World Institute hosted fourteen organizations representing different sectors on a two-day workshop. The aim of the workshop was to acquaint participants with the methods of monitoring the presence of marine litter, its successful removal and possible integration of monitoring results into the marine ecological observatory, ECOAdS, developed as part of the ECOSS project. Although coastal and underwater clean-up operations are carried out regularly in the Adriatic, systematic monitoring of their effectiveness has been lacking so far. Therefore, in addition to knowledge and experience exchange between scientists, civil society organizations, entrepreneurs and representatives of public services, they participated in a clean-up action in Kriška Bay on the island of Lošinj. During the clean-up, various methods of monitoring the presence and removal of marine litter were practiced.

The goal of the “Blue Network” initiative, that was developed during the gathering, is to encourage cross-sectoral cooperation of stakeholders active in marine litter problem solving at different levels, and to promote citizen involvement in coastal and underwater clean-up campaigns, with the ultimate goal to improve systematic monitoring of the waste collected in the Adriatic. This workshop was organized within the project ECOSS – Ecological Observing System in the Adriatic Sea: Oceanographic Observations for Biodiversity, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Interreg Italy-Croatia cross-border cooperation program. Creation of the “Blue Network” is supported by the “Trash Free Seas” program of the Ocean Conservancy organization, which has been operating globally for 40 years.