Marine plastic litter is a matter requiring urgent action given impacts on marine ecosystems, livelihoods, and industries including fisheries, tourism, and shipping, and potentially on human health. The “Osaka Blue Ocean Vision” was shared at the G20 Osaka summit in 2019, and has been already shared with further countries. The vision aims to reduce additional pollution by marine plastic litter to zero by 2050 through a comprehensive life-cycle approach. In order to reduce marine plastic litter and microplastics on a global scale efficiently, scientific evidence, such as hot spots, predicted amount of marine plastic litter and impacts on ecosystems or so, play a significant role in setting new measures to tackle marine plastic litter. However, due to some barriers, globally compiled monitoring data does not yet exist.
The harmonization and standardization of monitoring methods were listed as priority measures at the G7 Elmaus Summit in 2015 to further advance science-based measures. In addition, the “G20 Implementation Framework for Actions on Marine Plastic Litter”, which was established at the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Transitions and Global Environment for Sustainable Growth in 2019, calls for the promotion of harmonized monitoring methods. The follow-up meeting of the framework was held on 9-10 October, 2019, and the meeting identified anticipated future activities including an initiative of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan (MOEJ) to voluntarily take a lead in harmonized monitoring and data compilation.
In this context, MOEJ has conducted several projects and international expert meetings for harmonization and standardization of the methods since 2016. As a result, MOEJ was pleased to release “Guidelines for Harmonizing Ocean Surface Microplastic Monitoring Methods” in May 2019, and its revision in June 2020.
As the next step in harmonization and standardization of monitoring data, MOEJ has organized this webinar for the purpose to discuss the importance of globally compiled monitoring data and to promote a worldwide network for data sharing.