International - Untangling the origin and movement of ghost nets in the Indian Ocean to aid management and mitigation

Modern fishing nets are made to last. In contrast to other plastic marine pollution, fishing nets are also explicitly designed to entrap marine life. When lost or discarded these durable nylon, polypropylene or polyethylene nets remain intact and afloat for decades. Consequently, they continue to 'ghost fish' valuable fish stocks and damage critical coastal resources like coral reefs essential for sustaining artisanal fisheries and tourism-dependent communities. The now familiar image of lost or discarded fishing nets entangled with decomposing turtles, fish, seabirds and other creatures, attest to the deadly nature of this marine pollution. Less well recognised is the threat these 'ghost nets' pose to the food security and sustainable economic development of developing coastal nations. In 2015 the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI), a cross-sectorial alliance of stakeholders from the fishing industry, the private sector, NGOs, governments and intergovenmental organisations was launched to drive solutions to the problem of lost and abandoned fishing gear worldwide within the UN Global Partnership on Marine Litter. The GGGI has three strategic approaches; build evidence, define best practices and inform policies, and catalyse mitigation solutions. For the Indian Ocean the major local NGO stakeholder is the Olive Ridley Project (ORP; http://oliveridleyproject.org/), the CEO of which is a previous chair of the GGGI 'Build Evidence' Working Group. Our Innovation Project "Untangling the origin and movement of ghost nets in the Indian Ocean to aid management and mitigation" has been co-developed with both ORP and GGGI.
The Maldives are particularly vulnerable to this type of marine debris. Over 700 conglomerates of multiple individual nets and other fishing gear were recovered by Maldivian ORP citizen science volunteers between 2013-2017. These numbers represent only the tip of the iceberg in this vast remote region. Nets are not officially used in Maldivian fisheries, indicating that this local environmental crisis has come from far afield in the Indian Ocean, crossing international borders and turtle migration pathways. Clearly the problem needs addressing at the point of origin, but this is very difficult to pinpoint; the Indian Ocean contains a large number of low-income countries and is an extremely active region for international commercial fishing, as well as illegal and unreported fishing activities. Evidence is required to identify which regional fishing grounds are responsible for the ghost gear. It would also be invaluable for both mitigation and conservation efforts to demonstrate the journey ghost nets take, and areas of accumulation, as they drift across the ocean with the currents. In this project we propose to combine state-of-the-art ocean dispersal modelling and visualisation tools developed at Bristol University using one of the fastest and most advance supercomputing facilities in the UK, with data on recovered ghost nets from citizen science projects run by ORP in Thailand, Pakistan, India, Oman and the Maldives to backtrack their likely source within the Indian Ocean. We will modify our modelling capabilities, originally developed to identify the pathways coral larvae take from one reef to another across thousands of miles, applying this powerful tool to instead simulate the oceanic transport of nets. Visualisation tools developed during a NERC ERIIP funded project to map the probability of jellyfish blooms being transported to coastal power plants will be translated here to communicate the statistical likelihood of ghost gear originating from specific regional-scale fishing grounds stranding in the Maldives and other problem areas. The outcome of our collaboration will be strategic targeting of education and outreach efforts at the responsible sector and region by the ORP based on strong scientific evidence that will also be used by the GGGI to support transboundary decision-making and policy change actions.

The mobile nature of ghost nets means they drift across many international and regional borders. The solution relies on the collaboration of different stakeholders working with the fisheries sector and communities within the Indian Ocean to tackle the problem. The results from this project will help guide Project Partner Olive Ridley Project to region(s) that are contributing significantly as sources of nets. With this information ORP can prioritise resources to these areas and focus efforts to mitigate net release into the Indian Ocean in the future. Many factors contribute to the production of nets including poor gear management, gear conflicts, operational damage and discard. ORP has also found that many artisan-fishing communities around the Indian Ocean basin do not have the resources to deal with damaged gear (e.g. by recycling, reuse or appropriate means to dispose of the nets) nor the knowledge to make a connection on how it may impact their future livelihoods. ORP regularly partners with local NGOs (e.g. WWF-Pakistan) that work together to provide an educational resource to fishers that may not otherwise understand the short and long term implications of ghost nets. For solutions regarding marine debris and the protection of marine resources to be effective, policies must be reinforced with education to avoid resistance amongst local fisher communities. Imposing policies and changes in regulations without a structured and well-managed educational component, may lead to either complete non compliance or objection from the onset. Education reinforces change in the long term and this project and its partners are well suited to impact regional and/or country-scale policy and grass roots education. For example the ORP project coordinator and volunteers in Pakistan have successfully removed over 500kg of ghost gear over a 6 month period in 2017, in response to an ORP project of assimilation of information and then a community engagement to collect ghost gear for recycling and report lost gear.

ORP will connect the project to a network of regional bodies, namely the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), World Wide Fund (WWF), Marine Research Centre (MRC - Maldivian Government), Indian Ocean South East Asian (IOSEA) Sea Turtle Memorandum of Understanding, Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI), Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) and many local NGO's working in the region. In terms of change in best practice and policy to reduce ghost gear release into the Indian Ocean, the international alliance GGGI is best positioned to alter management decisions of commercial pelagic fisheries in international waters and impact both assessment and monitoring of illegal fishing activities through its extensive partnerships. For example, they have provided inputs into multiple UN resolutions and guidelines such as the UN FAO Guidelines on the Marking of Fishing Gear that were adopted in July 2018 and the UN General Assembly Sustainable Fisheries Resolution.

The 5-10 year outcome for the Maldives will be a reduction in the volume of ghost nets impacting their coastline and an increase in ghost net removal nearer source. This will be measured by ORP through its ongoing citizen science project, which feeds into a database using the Ghost Net Data Input Protocol developed by ORP and IUCN Maldives.