Marine Litter and Best Practices: the MARLISCO Case for Enhancing Social Co-Responsibility
Presented at the GreInSus 14 The International Congress on Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Societies/ Cities, May 8-10, 2014, Izmir, Turkey
By: Xenia I. Loizidou, Michael I. Loizides and Demetra Orthodoxou
Abstract
Marine litter is a key threat to marine habitats, economic and social wellbeing.The research, conducted within the framework of the FP-7 funded project MARLISCO ‘Marine Litter in Europe Seas: Social Awareness and Co-Responsibility’, aimed to identify best practices that can effectively minimise the amount of marine litter in European Seas, while promoting better integration among researchers, stakeholders and society.
In the framework of MARLISCO, each partner was tasked with identifying practices for the reduction of marine litter, using a dedicated template that aimed to structure the information in a way that would recognise and emphasise the key characteristics of a successful practice and those attributes that are necessary for making any practice a ‘best’ practice. The 72 best practices proposed by the MARLISCO partnership were approached in a novel way: they were evaluated using the DeCyDe-4-Marlisco decision support tool, which enhances the active participation and promotes capacity building of key actors.
The process for the evaluation and analysis of best practices identified seventeen clusters of practices, each representing initiatives with specific, and often innovative, characteristics. Furthermore, the stakeholders involved in the best practice evaluation also identified five ‘preference attributes’ for a successful marine litter management practice. The research shows that these clusters and ‘preference attributes’ can be used to identify best practices that can be implemented.
In MARLISCO, the 72 recorded best practices were approached as multi task tool: to identify implementable practices for reducing marine litter, to enhance stakeholder engagement, to promote networking and support decision making process, drawing from existing knowledge and expertise. The aim is to get inspired from best practices, and to recognise the characteristics that will make a marine litter management effort more successful in the particularity of local conditions.
Full paper available upon request